


Rain or Shine

by RiverDelta



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Jazz Age, Mad Scientists, Novella, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-09-06 22:26:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 23,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8771800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverDelta/pseuds/RiverDelta
Summary: When strange, inhuman monsters start to appear out of nowhere, it's up to a team of an exile from a global mad science conspiracy and a woman out of time to figure out what's going on.Rain or shine, Lazuli Investigations delivers. Payment after the case is complete.





	1. Magic and Madness

The cliché is that the detective lives in a cesspool city, eternal night and grey concrete. That couldn’t be further from the truth. My name is Lapis Lazuli, I’m a detective, and Beach City is a bright little tourist spot full of waterside stores. During these summer months, it’s drenched in sunlight, and we get a lot of kids who come over.

That doesn’t mean that Beach City isn’t a deadly city. It just means that the magical threats here aren’t the usual demons, fallen angels, werewolves, rogue wizards, or all that. Speaking of wizards, I’m a witch. In a sense. I don’t run around with a wand, I don’t cast spells, and I sure as hell don’t wear a ridiculous hat. It’s just that “witch” is quicker than “magic-user able to control water who was recently awakened ninety years in the future, in the distant year of 2016.”

So I go with “witch”. “The Water Witch”, I’ve been called. I don’t bother to tell people to stop. I honestly could care less. This is my office. Lazuli Investigations. Not bad for someone who was trapped in a mirror for ninety years.

Anyway, I rested in my old rolling chair. Too old. The upholstery foam peaked out of little cuts made in the material like plants growing out of soil, the seams having long split. My eyes were marred with noticeable bags, and the metal that made up the base of the chair was tarnished. The desk was an antique, probably from eighteen-whatever-ty-six, and the links in the shiny silver bracelet on my left wrist clattered as I spun around once.

The office was brightly lit, had no paintings on the walls, nor any other decor, but the ancient wallpaper could have come out of a horror movie. Not that talkies were really anything I was used to. Honestly, I still can’t believe that talkies became that big of a deal, but, thinking about it, I was always sort of contrary as a person. Nonetheless, a sophisticated workbench and system of elaborately-designated scrap, screws, technical manuals on shining shelves, and other things lay in Peridot’s half of the irregular room, and the mad genius herself happened to be welding without a mask.

I don’t call her a “mad genius” as an insult. There are better insults for her. Being a slightly crazy genius is actually kind of her thing. Magic makes sense. You channel your willpower, maybe use some things that give the channeling additional weight in your mind, like a focus or some rituals out of whatever “fantasy roleplaying game” you have on hand, and shit happens. That’s it.

There’s an opposite to magic, though, or a sort of other side to it. Lots of ways you can put it. Some people call it mad science. Some people just call it Inspiration. Peridot likes the latter, for obvious reasons. It’s science, but it doesn’t really make sense. Science is about logic, using a consistent system to try and figure out things, or applying knowledge to new purposes. Mad science, though, is about making the world bend to your will to accomplish not just the seemingly impossible (like airplanes) but the actually impossible (like hand-held atomizers). If that sounds like science-themed magic, that’s what I think it is. I see it as just a really weird school of magic, personally. The Republic of Letters, the current governing force for Inspired types, actually believes the opposite, that us wizardly-types use an unrefined form of their mad science, much like how if you show a video game with nearly-photorealistic graphics to a woman who doesn’t know the Depression happened, she’ll think you’re using some kind of weirdly complex illusion spell. Not that I’d know anything about that.

Anyway, that brings us back to Peri welding without a mask. By building something that doesn’t make scientific sense using mad science, she can avoid the dangers of creating it improperly, since she’s just making a really warped facsimile of that thing, not actually making that thing. At least, that’s how she tells it to me. Look, I don’t claim to be an expert on the Inspired or on the Republic of Letters, I just live in Beach City, which is sort of ruled unofficially by Yellow Diamond, the most “intelligent” (read: magically talented) Inspired to ever live. Back when I was alive, we didn’t have this crap in Beach City.

It was also a lot seedier, so that’s something. Good on Mayor Redding in the 70s for cleaning the joint up, I guess. Funny how now the biggest crooks are the ones with positions in city government. I mean, that’s how it always sort of was, but still. I spun my chair around and yelled over to Peridot, over the sparkler crackle that accompanied the flash of blue light around Peridot’s welding torch. It may as well have been a magic wand, in a few different senses. “Peri!”

* * *

 

My name is Peridot Diamond. You might notice that my name is made out of two different gemstones, neither of which is a normal name in any capacity. There’s a weird explanation for that. Everyone I’m related to is insane. As for Diamond, my mom’s insane, changing her last name to fit her RoL codename. Why Peridot? I would go on and on about the very interesting story that led my mom to choose that, but by this point you probably don’t care.

What you do care about is the fact that I built a giant robot with claw hands in high school, and haven’t stopped inventing the impossible since then. Or maybe you don’t. Look, I don’t know your life. Maybe you’re some bigshot who’s wondering “Why am I listening to the tiny, squeaky-voiced nerd when I could be listening to the beautiful flapper detective with the cigarette holder and the weird mystical powers that aren’t based around “fake science”?”

If so, the best answer is that for every Dr. Strange there’s a Tony Stark. If that makes sense. Not that I’m an egotistical millionaire or anything. I’m actually a mildly depressed thousand-aire on account of not knowing how to market any of my science children and not wanting some corporation to get their grubby hands on my shit. Also, I don’t have a robot suit.

Not yet. That’s actually what I’m working on. At the moment, I happen to be welding some armor plates together based on the principles of quantum modulation. That isn’t a real science. However, it works fine for Inspired people. So while I might not be born into any kind of wealth, I was born with the superpower of being able to do sciencey bullshit. In the 50s, radiation was the thing, but these days “nano” and “quantum” are enough to make things that wouldn’t make sense kinda-sorta-make sense. That’s really all that we need.

This is why werewolves and whatever lurk in the shadows while Inspired secretly control the world. Not that I’m one of those Inspired. My mom is, obviously, but she’s kind of the world’s biggest bitch, and the Republic of Letters is kind of terrible anyway. Not necessarily “evil”, just...bureaucratic. Seriously, you’d think that the people who govern Inspiration would be more...inspired, but I guess that all government sucks at the lives of those in power.

By the way, “Republic of Letters”? It’s a masturbatory reference to the origin of the Inspired. At some point, during the Enlightenment, a shit-ton of people started to pretty much discover that they could make up scientific laws and principles. Nobody really knows why, due to the Republic of Letters having most of that information destroyed due to the Great Purges of the 1970s and Blue Diamond’s shitty leadership. Anyway, the original Republic of Letters was some... Enlightenment intellectual thing. I forgot. I learned about it in my World History II course at Beach City University, but I sort of forgot, since I filled my head with science and mad science so I could become fucking Iron Man instead.

I think it was the right tradeoff. Who cares about history, anyway? Heh. Just a ton of clods in the past doing past clod shit. Except for the 20s, obviously. Mostly because Lapis won’t shut up about it. I mean, I’d probably be freaked out too if I was imprisoned when the Austro-Hungarian Empire just fell and I woke up in the era of the Russian Federation (I didn’t forget all of World History II. Just the really boring shit). So she has my sympathy.

Anyway, I continued to work on the left greave of my suit, welding the metal together. “What is it?” I responded to Lapis. Lapis begun to walk towards me, her hat cocked a bit on her head, and she reached down to brush a hand against my face. “I’m bored.” Lapis drew from her coat a bottle of water, and unscrewed the top. Water from the plastic bottle started to levitate out and form itself into many strange shapes, Lapis idly amusing herself.

  
_The year was 1927, and Lapis Lazuli didn’t know what she was going to do. Her opponent had a revolver in one hand and a strange necklace in the other, it was a cold, cold night, and the boardwalk was more or less empty. Do or die._


	2. Duels and Dollars

_The lights from the boardwalk were like little flames in a dark night, but the moon illuminated enough for the both of them to see. Lapis had chosen the place, Jasper had chosen the time. Lapis had assumed that she had the advantage, being the Water Witch on a boardwalk overlooking the turbulent waters. “You shouldn’t have called me weak, Lazuli.” Jasper said, away from the edge. In her hand she held an oaken staff carved with faintly-glowing runes, the old symbols burning like fire._

_“I wouldn’t call someone who killed thirty unarmed mortals strong.” Lazuli said, though Jasper shrugged. Lapis raised an eyebrow at Jasper’s taste, the jacket and vest stylish but for, well, men, but decided that it was probably slightly more practical for her job than a dress. Namely, beating anyone who disagreed with the Delmarva RoL to death as their pet warmage._

_Neither of them brought a second to the duel. Lapis didn’t have anyone who would die for her and Jasper didn’t bother to, assuming that she’d easily defeat the water witch, given that Jasper could do more than just control one classical element. The doctor turned his back on the two. If asked, he could say that he didn’t see any murder._

_“We can’t reach any satisfaction?” Jasper asked, smirking. In truth, she would be deeply disappointed if she didn’t get to use the necklace with the polished silver disc. Lapis shook her head and began to walk towards Jasper, down the boardwalk. Jasper did the same, and the two turned to stand back to back._

_“One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.” As agreed, they both walked ten paces away from one another, leaving a distance of a bit more than twenty feet between the two of them, due to Jasper’s size. Lapis felt with her mind and took hold of the ocean. This time, Jasper counted down, her gun at her side. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.” Jasper raised the mirror necklace and stopped counting, instead yelling into the air. She channeled all of her energy into this tiny object, forcing this quick and dirty evocation to work. “Carcerem!” At that, Lapis felt her connection to the water snap, and she broke into thousands of tiny bits of soul-energy. Those bits flew into the disc of the necklace like bullets from a gun, and Lapis reformed in a silvery prison dimension. She screamed and tried to beat at what she saw as the window out, creating no noise._

_“G’ night, you goddamn bearcat.” Jasper snorted and put the necklace in her coat pocket, resolving to get a drink sometime tonight. Hopefully something from a good joint._

* * *

 

_The year was 2014, and Peridot had just graduated from college. Her family, living in far-away Phoenix, because of course they fucking did, couldn’t actually fly across the country to Delmarva to see her. Not because they didn’t have the money. Yellow Diamond alone probably had significant amounts of shares in Exxon-Mobil, Apple, three major banks, and who knew what else, and they lived in goddamn luxury in Ass Desert City. No. They couldn’t come because they couldn’t be bothered._

_That was what the letter actually said. Her personal assistant typed up a letter reading, as follows:_

_“Dear Peridot Diamond,_

_It has come to my attention that you have graduated from Beach City University. I know this because you keep trying to tell us, and it’s getting annoying. See, here in Phoenix, we actually have important things to do, and your constant blabbering about nothing is not helping matters. Your mother raised you to be better, young lady. So you’ve graduated. Big deal. Nobody cares._

_Signed,_

_YP, Personal Assistant to Yellow Diamond”_

_It was that moment when Peridot realized that she wouldn’t be going back to Phoenix anytime soon. Why Phoenix? Big city, near where the atom bomb was made, not so big as to be dangerous. Apparently the entire goddamn technocracy was centered around Pheonix “We burned down once, that’s our claim to fame”, Arizona._

_It couldn’t be in LA, or New York, or whatever, could it? Come on. She would have killed to go to NYU or something. But no. Arizona. She hated Arizona. Almost as much as she hated New Mexico. That was basically just Arizona but with even less shit. Texas, of course, was just superior Arizona, in her eyes, due to Austin, Houston, and...Fuck it, she saw most of the world relative to her extremely sheltered upbringing as the mostly unwanted third child of the unofficial Queen of the World._

_It should go without saying that Peridot ended up writing a letter back that was written in a similar tone._

_“Dear The Personal Assistant To Yellow Diamond,_

_Do you have any idea who I am? I’m Peridot Diamond! I invented a giant mech for a high school science fair one year, and the next fair I created a teleporter! Nobody could replicate it, due to it not actually being scientific, but still! I am Reed Richards. I am Tony Stark. I am Hank Pym. If I wanted to, I could just read through my extensive stack of comic books and actually rip off scientific discoveries! Like 60% of them would be doable! Can you do any of that shit? No. Clod. Because you’re a personal assistant to my mom, and I’m her actual daughter! Also, I’m in the pleasant and comfortable heat of Beach City, while you’re melting in the one-hundred degree heat of Phoenix. Tell Mom I think she’s a clod too, okay, YP?_

_Fuck you,_

_Peridot Diamond”_

_Aside from any hostile letters that may have sealed her estrangement to the current sort-of-mad-science-royal-family, Peridot happened to be in an antiques shop, looking for something to melt down. If the Iron Man movie taught her anything, while melding gold with titanium seemed, logically, like a terrible idea that would at best give you weak titanium, apparently it worked fine for Iron Man, and what was good enough for Iron Man was good enough for her._

_That was, of course, until she looked at the glass cases and found a shimmering necklace with a strangely low price. Only fifty dollars, and it was marked as silver, too. She looked at the clerk, and inquired about this strangeness. “Hey, why’s the silver necklace so cheap?” She asked. The clerk shrugged his shoulders and adjusted his red apron. “It may or may not have a cursed human being or ghost or something trapped in there, and she’s probably looking for violent revenge on the world..”_

_Peridot immediately reached into her worn leather bag and drew her Pokémon wallet (she got it at DelmarvaCon a while back and it hadn’t broken yet). Luckily having fifty dollars on her, due to bad habits gained while living in the Diamond household, Peridot handed the store clerk two Jacksons and a Hamilton. “I want it.”_

_“What?”_

_“Look, I want the ghost necklace.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because do you have any idea what a live ghost would be? That could change actual science! Not bullshit science, like aether or psionics, but actual science. I could get into papers, become well-known!”_

_“She might kill you. We think she might be the Water Witch.”_

_“...I know her!_

_“What?”_

_“I heard about her in my Jazz Age Literature class. Look, I promise I won’t do anything unethical with the ghost. Okay? Just let me have her. I’m paying you and everything.”_

_“Fine.”_

_Peridot did a little fist pump and took the necklace from the clerk’s palm. It felt cold to the touch. Slightly slimy. Ew. She licked it, to make sure that there wasn’t snot or something on it. No snot, but it did taste very fishy. Like mediocre sushi. She knew that taste. She’d had a lot of mediocre sushi in her day, since it was cheap and they delivered to dorm rooms._

  
_As she walked out the door, she was pretty sure that she heard the clerk mutter something along the lines of “...Damn. Should have asked for more!”_


	3. Out of Time

_ Peridot wasn’t really sure how to open up a magic bracelet, magically speaking. She wasn’t some kind of wizard. Or witch. Some women who did magic used “witch”, some didn’t. Or a warmage. Or whatever. Goddamn, magic-users needed to find some unified way to refer to themselves. _

_ However, she knew how to open up a magic bracelet using superscience. That was simple. Quantum-phase nullifier bomb. She just made up the word a day ago, but she had a working sort of giant metal pill thing with little electric bits sticking out. The idea was that it would interfere with the quantum state of the necklace and purge it of its magical influence forcibly. She also had the proton pack from Ghostbusters on her back. You know, in case the purging let the ghost escape. _

_ Unlicensed nuclear accelerator on her back. Safe? Probably not, but she didn’t plan to use it for much. Same with the Ghostbusters ghost trap on the floor of her tiny apartment, which had seen better days. Also days where it wasn’t stuffed with schematics, scrap metal, comic books, video games, and stuffed animals.  _

_ Proton pack in both hands, QPNB on the table (She called it the Quip, for short), she finally yelled out the command words. “Sigma-epsilon detonation!” With a flash of light, the Quip released a charge of pink energy, and the room was temporarily salmon-colored. However, the necklace released many tiny peach-blue specks, throwing them into the air. They then coalesced, slowly, into a woman in a long trench coat and hat, who rushed to Peridot, making her drop the proton pack. _

_ That hit the ground with a clang, and the Water Witch actually, in the euphoria of freedom, gave Peridot a massive hug. “Please don’t experiment on me. I’m not a ghost.” She breathed, quickly and anxiously. Peridot rolled her eyes. “So you’re just a detective from the 1920s and not some kind of ghost?” _

_ “Yeah.” _

_ “Dammit, I spent a week making all of this ghost shit and now I don’t have a ghost. Eh, I’ll find some use for the nuclear accelerator.” The Water Witch tilted her head. “Nuclear accelerator? Nuclear?” Peridot sighed. “It’s 1980s fake science based on 1940s real science. Twenty years ahead of your time.” _

_ “I hope the world hasn’t changed too much since 1927. I haven’t seen much out of that goddamn bracelet.” She said the word “bracelet” like she would a curse. Actually, no. Peridot said “fuck” usually with less anger and spite than this woman used for “bracelet”.  _

_ “...It’s changed a lot. I’m sorry.” _

_ “Well, do they still need detectives?” _

_ “Yeah, just for different problems. This city isn’t ruled by multiple vampire cabals and the Fae. Not anymore. It’s the Republic of Letters. They rule a lot of things now. The 1950s gave them so much power. Sci-fi writers and comic book writers just started making shit up around then and that became good enough for the Inspired to abuse. So now they unofficially rule most of the world.” _

_ “Sci-fi?” _

_ “Stories about the future and about weird technology and stuff.” _

_ “Do...Do you know what happened to Jasper?” Lapis asked, more curious now than anything. She began to collect herself while Peridot sighed. This clearly was not a good topic. “Ugh. Jasper the Warmage?” _

_ “Yeah.” _

_ “She picked up some kind of social darwinist ideology in the 30s, got into it fully in the 40s, and hasn’t stopped being a pain in my ass since. She used to come to Arizona to defend my mom at significant family functions and speeches and shit. That was before the Unum had been fully cleared out of Arizona. Even though Arizona was pretty naturally anti-vampire, the incredibly loose vampire government would sometimes pay a loup-garou to fuck shit up, or send hit men or whatever. Actually, government’s a bad way of putting it. More like some shitty, messy, uniting organization.  _

_ “When Jasper finally made it clear on top of a pile of bodies that the Southwest was Inspired territory, and soon the entire Western US would fall under Inspired control completely, since they really only had fingers in mortal pies, it was hailed in my family’s circle as being a great triumph for humanity, for science and reason over wizardry.” _

_ “But Inspired don’t use science or reason.” _

_ “I know. We like to pretend that we’re like human beings. We still eat, we still dream, we don’t crave blood or slaughter or whatever. I do it because I try and stay humble. Inspired have a...problem with narcissism and mania. I’ve slipped into it from time to time. I used to be like a goddamn supervillain sometimes in Arizona. Death lasers and everything. I think that a lot of other Inspired would rather be the peak of human progress than some warped pseudo-magic spawn of the human race that they claim to have the right to rule.” _

_ “I missed a lot, didn’t I?" _

_ “...Yeah.” _

_ “We don’t have to think about this right now, Peridot. I’ve had nobody for....however long I’ve been trapped. Can we just...be here? Together? Look, I finally have someone who went to the trouble to free me, to help me. That’s...rare for me.” _

_ Peridot nodded and pointed at a ratty kelly green couch in the corner of the room. “You wanna sit down?” Lapis nodded and took Peridot’s hand, bringing the both of them to the couch. _

_ Lapis’ gestures were contractive, Peridot guessed by nature, and so Peridot reached over and put a small hand on her thigh. While Lapis was waifish, even in the trousers and trench coat, Peridot still felt a bit tiny in comparison. She looked up and saw that Lapis seemed to smile. A bit. Not much, but it was something. _

_ Lapis sighed, though Peridot thought it was a happy sigh, and the detective closed her eyes. “How the hell am I going to get back to work? What year is this?” Lapis asked. Peridot sighed sadly and shook her head. “2014. We’re in a global economic recession, Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead are still on TV, even though they should be cancelled by now, Firefly should be on but was cancelled...shit, most of that meant nothing to you, probably. It’s 2014.” _

_ “The 21st century? God damn. I always thought of that as some kind of distant future, if I thought about it at all. It...doesn’t look that different from 1927, really. How the hell am I going to get back to work as a detective? My office’s probably been sold by now. Probably even been resold. If there’s been a second Great War or something, it might even be bombed.” She laughed at the morbid joke. _

_ “World War II, and we were like the one country that wasn’t bombed. You know, I’m starting to think that all of this bullshit history knowledge that I never saw a purpose for is going to get kind of useful in the future. Sadly. Because I’m pretty sure that-” Peridot stopped ranting as Lapis gave Peridot a quick kiss on the cheek. “Shut your trap for a second.” _

_ At that, Peridot pretty much froze up, and watched in confusion as Lapis stood up and surveyed the house. From Lapis’ perspective, other than the odd strange device, mostly shiny boxes of varying sizes and forms, it really wasn’t that different from a house she’d know. She didn’t see much from inside the bracelet, and sort of assumed that by 2014 people would be living...differently. She wasn’t sure how, but differently. _

_ In a way, it was almost disappointing. Another disappointing fact was that apparently Jasper was both still alive, probably due to some mad science bull or magic or something, and she had some level of power. Life wasn’t fair. Lapis gets imprisoned for decades, thrown into a world like a warped reflection of her world, and given only one person who cares about her, while Jasper gets to live the normal way and gain influence and more magical ability.  _

_ Well, life wasn’t fair. That was how it was. When life gave you rocks, you either made do with your goddamn rocks or you died. _

_ That was how Lapis lived her life. Pessimistic, sure, but it seemed to work. Especially in an era where all of the booze was....Dammit! Prohibition! “Peridot. Is Prohibition still a thing in 2014?”  _

_ “No, but I don’t drink alcohol. Kills brain cells.” _

_ “Oh my god.” Lapis buried her face in one hand but began to laugh anyway. She should probably be happy that she could theoretically get a drink, if inflation hadn’t made her wallet change useless, but just the smug, self-satisfied tone that Peridot said that with. ‘I don’t drink alcohol. Kills brain cells.’ _

_ “Have you ever drank?” _

_ “...No.” _

_ “You and I are getting some beer.” _


	4. Hearts and Hangovers

_Longshore Taverns felt like a very deep closet to Peridot. There were a few wooden tables lining one side of the place, but otherwise there was a bar, a very impressive liquor cabinet, and not too much action. It had taken some quick Googling to find a place close to her house in Beach City, but, hey, there they were._

_Lapis sat at the bar next to Peridot, and Lapis ordered drinks for the both of them. Peridot wasn’t arguing. “A Ward 8 for me and some Budweiser or something for her.” Normally, Peridot would get pretty indignant about this, but she still wasn’t fully sure what was going on. Releasing a witch from a bracelet who insisted on getting booze with you sort of did that._

_“Ward 8?” The bartender asked, a bit confused. Lapis closed her eyes. “Rye whiskey, orange juice, lemon juice, and grenadine.” The bartender laughed a bit. “Seems sweet.” He looked over at her appearance, clearly amused at the seeming contradiction. “It has to be sweet to cover up the whiskey. Especially if it’s crap whiskey, and it always used to be crap whiskey.”_

_The bartender shrugged and Lapis watched him begin to prepare the drink. Peridot finally collected herself to ask an obvious question. “What is this, Lapis? Is this supposed to be some kind of date? I freed you from the bracelet, and then you kissed me, and now-”_

_“Don’t you have to pay when you ask someone on a date? Also, aren’t dates a thing that you usually need a man for?”_

_“One, not really. Two, yes. You do have to pay.”_

_“I had five bucks in my wallet, we checked, it’s now...37 cents. I’m not able to pay for anything, so it’s not a date. Just two women out at the bar. It’s nice though that dates are different, now. Nobody really talked about that kind of thing back then.”_

_“I can’t believe this. Clod!” Peridot’s whole body tensed up as she glared at Lapis, who quickly realized her mistake and sighed. “Peridot. I’m sorry. This is just what I know. I’ve just met you, and you’re the only person who’s cared about me in almost a century, and...God dammit. Look, if you want, we can just turn around now. Go home.”_

_Peridot thought about it for a second. She sighed. “You’re going to be the death of me, Lazuli. Fine. We’re staying. Time to kill some brain cells.” The bartender finished Lapis’ bright yellow-orange drink, and opened up Peridot’s beer for her. Lapis took the glass in her hand and began to sip it gingerly._

_Damn, the whiskey was a lot better these days._

_Peridot, meanwhile, began to drink the beer. It was...foreign, but actually quite pleasant. In a strange and bitter sort of way. Maybe her taste buds were just completely screwed up. After some time, the tiny woman in the fleece zip-up sweatshirt, the kelly green one, finished her bottle. “...I feel like I need to have a more...comprehensive test of this. Can I have another bottle?”_

_The bartender got around to handing her another cold bottle, slightly thankful that things were this simple for once in the life of John Anderson, bartender, social butterfly, and law student. He opened up the bottle up and Peridot continued drinking the minimally-alcoholic beer. Lapis, meanwhile, politely finished her drink and seemed merely slightly tipsy. After half of that bottle, Peridot turned to John Anderson, bartender, social butterfly, and law student, and ordered another two beers._

_The more she drank, the less she had an issue with drinking more, and soon Lapis had to physically hold a blacked-out Peridot. She apologized profusely to the bartender, John Anderson, social butterfly, and law student, and took some of Peridot’s money to mix with her old bills to help pay. Peridot would thank her later._

_In the Jazz Age, there were specific cocktails meant to get someone with a hangover out of a hangover, but Lapis assumed that getting any more alcohol in this woman would be a bad idea._

_Lapis found Peridot’s car keys in her jacket pocket, after a quick pat down, and that was that._

_Luckily, Peridot was light and easily carried out the door and to Peridot’s old automobile. Peridot’s backseat became her bed, and Lapis took driver’s seat. It was slow going, trying to balance the needs of getting to Peridot’s apartment as quickly as possible and the needs of not banging Peridot’s face against the back of the front passenger’s seat accidentally, but Lapis did the job and pulled the ancient car up on the side of the street. She left the car, took the key out of the ignition, and grunted, lifting Peridot as best as she could into the building, having to set her down on the ground gently to open the door, only to pick her back up and place her across the couch._

_On one hand, Peridot was doll-like and tiny, so she was lifted relatively easily. On the other hand, Lapis would still have rather had some kind of water limb do it for her, but then she might wake up Peridot. Lapis took off her coat and hat, putting the former on the doorknob and the latter on a coffee table that looked as though it was carved by homesteaders in the 19th century. Not in a rustic sense, more in a battered sense. It was not a very nice coffee table. The rings from cups and mugs that covered it like freckles attested to that._

_Lapis, now simply wearing a simple, short dress in navy blue, went to the kitchenette and began to fill up some of Peridot’s paper cups with water from the sink. Why Peridot didn’t own glasses for water, she had no idea. Actually, her best guess was laziness, but she didn’t want to think that lowly of Peridot._

_Actually, her feelings on Peridot were, frankly, complicated. Probably best to put those aside for now and focus on the task at hand. She methodically laid out the filled cups in a grid pattern across the coffee table. When it was finally covered, she simply sat down on the floor by the corner of the couch, looking up at Peridot’s head, and waited. She could wait. She’d gotten very good at waiting._

_She looked at the convenient digital clock (actually, she couldn’t find a single analogue clock in the entire house), and when three hours of Lapis just sitting on the floor and waiting had passed, Peridot finally woke up. Peridot then screamed. “God dammit!”_

_“What? Are you Jake?”_

_“I feel like I’m going to throw up and I have the worst headache of my life, of course I’m not “Jake”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean! God, I read about hangovers, but...I don’t know if you’re the clod here, or I am, but one of us is a lumpy, clumpy clod.”_

_“Lumpy, clumpy clod.”_

_“Oh, screw you.”_

_“Look, I got you water. A lot of water. The only things that are going to help this are water and time, Peridot.”_

_“You’re the hangover expert?”_

_“Trust me, I wish I could have gotten booze of that quality. You ever try bathtub gin? Don’t. Just...” She reached up and put a hand on Peridot’s arm. “Are you able to reach over and get one of the glasses?”_

_“Fuck, I can. What about headache meds?”_

_“I wouldn’t risk it.”_

_“God dammit!”_

_Lapis reached over and took one of the Dixie cups, handing it to Peridot, whose hand trembled as she tried to hold it. She brought it up to her mouth and began to sip gingerly. “I think I might puke.”_

_“Got any pots or something?” Lapis said, with the sort of uncharacteristic urgency that one can only get when one is afraid of being covered in vomit. Peridot shook her head. “Bottom drawer left of the sink!” Lapis ran to the kitchen and came back with a shiny metal vomit pot. She put it under Peridot’s head, and Peridot tried to vomit, but couldn’t get anything more than spit out. She winced at the head pain._

_Peridot sighed and went back to drinking from the cup of water. “Why are you doing this, Lazuli? Because you’re hoping to keep the only advantage you have? Because you pity me? Because you’re a stupid clod who’s into stupid clods like me?”_

_“Because I want my advantage, I pity you, I may or may not be into you, we’ll see, and because I’m a decent person. In the end, that’s all we can be. Not everything is about power or pity or whatever, Peridot.”_

  
_“I know. I just forget that sometimes, and sudden charity doesn’t really help it much.”_


	5. Vomit and Victims

_ “This isn’t charity. It’s decency. Or kindness. Whatever you want to call it. Charity is something you do out of pity, or to make yourself feel better, or because you want to help someone else. I just like you. Probably without good cause, but forgive me if I’m a bit biased in how I regard the person who gave me my life back.” _

_ “Yeah, well, you’re at least looking at someone who deserves-” She winced and groaned loudly at the pain of her headache. “-deserves the...liking.” Peridot continued to drink from the paper cup, finishing it, and throwing it across the room. Lapis took some of the leftover water in the cup and used it to halt the cup’s ascent and push it back down to the table, beads of water moving across the outside of the cup to control it. _

_ “I’d hope so.” _

_ “Lapis?” Peridot’s whole face was scrunched up as she held her temples. “Three things.” Lapis shrugged and responded. “Sure.” Peridot continued. “1. I’m never drinking again. Not worth it. 2. Why did Jasper trap you in a mirror? 3. You didn’t have anyone, did you, back then?” _

_ Lapis snorted at that. “Jesus Christ, Peridot. Number one, we’ll see how you feel later, but right now, keep drinking, and if you need to puke, use the pot. Number two, I think she wanted an easy victory. She can do a lot, but I can do one thing very well. She probably just wanted an edge. Number three, I had someone, though not a guy. Her name was Jasper. I think that her and I broke up.” At that, Lapis gave a very hollow laugh.  _

_ “...What?” Peridot almost forgot the fact that it felt like she’d been beaten over the head with a bat. Almost. _

_ “It was a messy relationship. We were cohabitating. We both had stable income, and other than her elitism and callousness, she wasn’t terrible. Then she fell in with the Republic of Letters, and I think a lot of the societal restraints she had that made her normal she didn’t have to deal with. So she became...not a monster, but a bad person. Worse, a bad person obsessed with me. When we’d have time alone, she’d use the energy of that time to fuel her magic. It did a lot for her, but it was like booze. Do it too much and you have a habit.” _

_ “...Well, Jasper apparently changed a lot from 1927.” Peridot said. She then chugged down an entire paper cup within a few seconds. _

_ “What’s she like now?” _

_ “Believes in this idea of social darwinism, that some people are genetically stronger or weaker, and that strength is everything. She’s arrogant, insulting, was apparently part of the German-American Bund for a while before leaving that, is still getting over some racism from the 30s and 40s, seems to love slaughter, barely answers to anyone, and considers herself an ultimate magical being, being a powerful warmage able to do a ton of different things. She’s a bitch.” _

_ “So not much has really changed, but she’s gotten worse?” _

_ “I guess. I still can’t imagine why you’d date her.” _

_ “It seemed like a good idea at the time, and that’s all we’ll say about that, Peri. Any idea how she survived?” Lapis said, slightly embarrassed to discuss this. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ described a lot of relationships, honestly, she considered. _

_ “One. “Peri”? Really? You are into me. Normally people need giant neon signs saying “Peridot Diamond, I Am Into You”, but hey. Apparently we have that.” _

_ “Don’t be insulting.” _

_ “Sorry. Two. I’m really not sure how she survived. I only saw her at big events and stuff, and would you ask the six foot woman in the magically armored coat who can make things explode at will and does so for fun probing questions like that? If I was going to ask that, I may as well ask why a group so dedicated to human reason or whatever employs someone with her abilities, and you know I’m not asking that, either.” _

_ Lapis nodded and stood up, watching Peridot drink cup after cup after cup, the grid she set up shrinking to a snake, which continued to grow shorter and shorter. As Peridot tossed each cup into the air, Lapis would guide the cup using the leftover water into three large towers set up on the floor of the apartment. _

_ After a while, Lapis stood up from the floor and began to look around. “Hey, any idea where I could find you a blanket?” Peridot nodded. “Closet. Down the hall and to the right. First door.” Lapis followed the instructions to find a beige closet, which she opened to find that it was partially full of blankets and towels and partially full of some kind of waterproof crab robot with a plastic bubble for a body. “Peridot, what’s the crab machine thing doing?” _

_ “It was a gift from White Diamond when I was a kid. I haven’t touched it, but I’m planning to scrap it sometime or another.” Lapis nodded and found a fleece blanket with some stylized pastel character on it. Lapis couldn’t say who. She brought the blanket over to Peridot, and before she was able to actually put it over Peridot, the latter woman finally began to puke, and puke she did. _

_ Quickly, amidst coughing, the bowl was full, and Lapis quickly dropped the blanket to the floor to grab some paper towels for Peridot to wipe her mouth with. “You’re done?” _

_ “Yeah. I’m done.” _

_ “Thank god.” Lapis said, as Peridot made herself reasonably clean. However, she did just toss the paper towels into the incredibly disgusting brownish sludge in the shining pot, so honestly... _

_ “Don’t act so smug.” Peridot narrowed her eyes at the taller woman, but Lapis just relaxed her posture and put a hand on Peridot’s shoulder, the thin fingers spreading out a bit. “I’ve been here before, Peridot. With Jasper, and...Look, I didn’t start out a hard boiled drinker.” _

_ “Hard boiled?” _

_ “You get what I mean. I had night after night puking into the sink, or knocked out, or whatever, especially when I first started drinking. It wasn’t healthy, and so if I seem condescending, just know that I’ve done this.” _

_ “That was...oddly empathetic for you.” _

_ “Well, I can’t be a frigid broad all the time.” Lapis turned away from Peridot and sighed. Honestly, it was nice to know that ninety years later that was still who she was. Really.  _

_ “Well, I can’t be a smug know-it-all all the time, so fair’s fair. Clod.” _

My name is Lapis Lazuli, the year is 2016, and I sat in my office and heard the sound of six knocks at the door. Two people. I could tell because one set of knocks was quick and hard, while the other set was significantly softer. I got up out of the ancient chair, opened the door, and turned the knob.

The door creaked.

I saw two children standing by the doorframe. One looked a bit meek and pudgy. I assumed he was doing the lighter knocking. The other was taller and thinner, but carried herself with confidence. The sort of confidence that you get when you know you can kick the ass of anyone trying to go after you. I’d seen it before, in too many people to count. 

The boy wore a shirt with a yellow star on it, the girl what looked like some kind of combat uniform, for some martial art I’d never heard of. She carried a sword. Whatever kind of person was training a kid to fight with a real sword, I had no idea. Well, this was Beach City.

The girl spoke first. “Hello? You’re detectives, right? There’s something you might want to check out.”

“That would be?” I asked.

“Monsters, made of limbs and eyeballs, fused together. I saw two on the beach. Steven and I barely escaped with our lives.”

“You kept him safe?”

“No, we fight together.” She corrected me. It was subtle, but that seemed to be very important to her.

I turned to Peridot. “Do we waive the fee until the job’s done? They’re kids.” Peridot nodded to me while she worked on her armor.

  
“Now where do we start?”


	6. Hold Your Nose and Close Your Eyes

“Kids, come back in a week. We’ll probably have it all sorted out.” I turned to them and quickly glanced at Peridot. The little girl made a “mmm-hmmm” noise, and the boy nodded, enthusiastically. He was more afraid than she was. She should have been afraid, after what she’d seen.

What had made that poor kid like that?

They left the office and I closed the door. I didn’t mean to, but I think that I slammed it. I locked the door, deadbolt, out of habit. Peridot turned to me, one arm extended by and half-covered in a crude kelly green armored gauntlet. “I’ve got an idea. You’re really not gonna like it, though. I would say I’m proud of it, but I’m really not.”

“Lay it on me.”

“I know someone with expertise in divination and knowledge of the kind of weird Inspired mad science that living balls of fused limbs and eyeballs sounds like it could be to me. It’s just that she’s ninety years old, the world’s biggest clod, and named Jasper Princeton, Wizard for Hire.”

“God dammit.”

“You got any better ideas? I could try and create something, but the universe doesn’t really like “I need to know about this” Inspired...things unless you really bullshit it, and even then, it probably won’t work. It’s not science. It doesn’t follow logic. You can make ghost killing devices but not some kind of Ghost Pokédex to tell you about ghosts, you can make space lasers but not space telescopes. Science is about discovering the universe. Mad science is about bullshit, mostly.”

I sighed. Time to hold my nose and close my eyes. I drew from my pocket one of Peridot’s spare iPhones (She had one that she bought with her own money, and two old ones, mostly from her time in college before her falling-out), and navigated it as best as I could, sticking to the phone function since that was what I knew.

I had the barest idea of what exactly an iPhone could do, and to me it may as well have been some mad science gadget. It made the same amount of sense. “You got Jasper’s number?” Peridot shrugged. “Go look it up or something. Probably Phoenix, Arizona.” At least I knew how a phone book worked. That was something. “Should I try a phone book?”

* * *

 

God dammit, a phone book? Really? “Fuck it, I’ll just Google it.” I drew my phone, you know, the one with the shiny green case, and began to search. I also eyed the crumpled sweatshirt on the floor, since just wearing a tank top was great for armor forging, but now it was starting to get cold, so...

I put ‘Jasper Princeton, Wizard’ into an  _ online  _ phone book, because damned if I wasn’t going to do this the most efficient way possible, and within a minute I had a number. “Okay, so...we’re drawing straws to determine who actually has to call her, right?”

“Do you see any straws?”

“Yeah. Flip a coin.”

“Sure.”

I walked to my hoodie, looking briefly at the tools I’d set down and deactivated, and drew my wallet from the front pocket. It was leather, old, and smelt a bit weird, but it was my wallet. I would like to say that it was sentimental, but I sort of keep forgetting to buy a new wallet and I don’t know if I can afford one anyway (I’m tempted to just use a ziploc bag), so...

I drew a quarter. “Heads or tails?”

She shrugged. “Heads.” 

I flipped the coin, it spun in the air once or twice, and when it landed on the floor I bent down to inspect it. Mother fucker! Okay, on one hand this means that Lapis doesn’t have to directly talk to the person who imprisoned her and stole her world away or whatever. On the other hand, this sucks from my personal perspective and that is more than annoying.

I sighed and punched in the number to my phone, calling her. I didn’t have to leave a message.

“Hello? This is Wizard Princeton. Who are you?”

I heard a voice that was...not too dissimilar to how I tend to treat random people who call me, except it was a lot deeper and somewhat angrier. “It’s Peridot Diamond. You know. Peridot Diamond. There’s something I need to ask you about. It’s important.”

“Can it wait? I’m in the middle of something.”

“Is it a blood sacrifice?”

“What, do you think I’m some kind of satanist? I’m just setting up a thaumaturgical ritual and everything needs to be perfectly aligned. It’s not volatile or anything, well, not yet, but everything needs to be aligned.”

“It doesn’t matter. There are kids who are in danger, and other people probably here who are in danger too, and if you know anything about mutant monsters made of limbs and eyeballs that go after people, would you be able to tell us?”

There was a pause. Complete silence for a few seconds. She then responded. “You know, that does sound familiar. But you and your girlfriend-”

“She’s not my girlfriend. We just live together and sometimes make out. That’s probably normal roommate behavior.”

“It’s not.”

Apparently college lied to me. Here I thought I was doing it without all of the pointless angst. Dammit. “Whatever. What do you want from her?”

“I just want a reunion. You two meet me at the fry stand in Beach City, I’ll tell you what I know for a price, and I get to see the wayward daughter and the bitch I thought I iced ninety years ago. Don’t worry, I won’t bring my staff.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You can’t, and you shouldn’t. It’s just that that bitch has the ability to control water, and you have whatever weapons you can pull out of your ass.”

“It’s not that simple. I have to still build them.”

“Whatever. If I did pull something, I’d have to be pretty damn stupid to do it. Besides. Do you really have a choice, Peri?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Lapis calls you that when she makes meals for your maturity-deficient ass. Noon, this Sunday, two days from now, Beach City Fries or whatever the fuck it’s called. I haven’t been there in a while. Deal?”

“Deal.” I hung up first, just to spite her. “Okay, it seems like Jasper’s willing to work with us on this. She’s coming to the fry place at noon in two days to talk, and she says she won’t bring her staff. Even if she’s lying, we can probably overpower her if she really wants to fight.”

Lapis didn’t respond.

* * *

 

After a while, I finally got myself together. This was just a talk, I’d be safe, I knew Jasper’s tricks, if I saw her say something then Peri (Peridot, that was kind of an embarrassing slip) would probably be able to attack. I surveyed the line of complex weapons, blasters, and one  _ lightsaber  _ (“Vader’s, obviously”, in Peridot’s words), and the half-finished green and gold battle armor that Peridot seemed to be working on, metal plating covering the skeleton only partially.

“Why’d you even make a lightsaber, anyway?” I asked, trying to change the subject to anything else. Peridot shrugged. “Think about it, Lapis. Literally everyone who’s seen any Star Wars movie has wanted a lightsaber, and I actually can make that kind of thing real. It was the first major Inspired project I ever committed myself to, really.”

“It’s not really that practical. What’s a light sword going to do that a gun isn’t? Or a cutting torch?”

“Look, I get that you kind of passed by  _ Star Wars _ , but it was sort of a massive cultural event. Everyone wanted to be in  _ Star Wars,  _ everyone wanted to use the Force, and everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to play with a goddamn lightsaber. So I made a lightsaber.” To demonstrate, she took the lightsaber off of the shelf, standing on her toes to grab it, and held it out, the blade firing out in cinnabar. “I am so awesome!”

  
Well, at least she was distracted.


	7. Fear and Faeries

A day passed, and I happened to be in a strip club, namely the Mystic Glade. Being essentially a Faerie front, it was staffed largely by the Fair Folk, mostly the Summer Court. There’s a lot that I know about the Fair Folk, being a magic-user, but the quickest way that I could put it would be that they’re completely amoral beings of myth who fall under one of two categories, Summer Court or Winter Court. Summer and Winter constantly fight in a secret war, and Summer is about life, passion and growth, while Winter is about death, bloodlust, and cold. Summer is not good. Winter is not bad. Fae in general are completely amoral, bound only to their whims and to the rules which guide them and which they constantly subvert, and, for one, the Summer Lady is a violently insane cannibal. She’s also the second-in-command to the Summer Queen, Titania.

Conversely, there needs to be Winter to keep things from growing out of control, in a very dark sort of way. Winter’s Queen, Mab, is also a brutal manipulator. Essentially...Basically the Fae in general are great to be around individually, but they’re also the magical world’s con artists who follow anti-logic as much as logic. I’ll shut my trap, though, about them.

The Mystic Glade as a club was full of neon lights and sweeping orange and green laser lights, dancers in very little or nothing with bodies that looked all very different, mostly at the whims of how the individual Fae in question saw themself, as some were more human in superficial ways than others, but all possessed the kind of casual self-confidence that comes from knowing that you are a being of wonder and awe, as far removed from nature and normal reality as the stars are to the earth.

Honestly, I don’t think that many of them even cared about money. I think that for most of the dancers, lighting staff, and all, it was just pure boredom. If you live for hundreds of lifespans, eventually you’re going to devote a fraction of one of those lifespans to dancing, I guess. Anything to feel something new, something different. I heard once, right after the Great War, a rumor that anyone who kills a Summer Faerie, any Summer Faerie of any kind, from a tiny sprite to...whatever were here, sees every single moment of the slain's life compressed down into a few seconds.

Sounds great, until you realize that torture, rape, and serial killing are also probably ways to relieve boredom.

Anyway, though, I was with an associate. Amethyst. If Jasper and I had been in the business of supernatural things for almost the entire 20th century, Amethyst was kind of the up-and-coming rising star of Delmarva. Jasper could do everything, I could do one thing very well...Amethyst just hit things with a cat-o-nine-tails and threw people around telekinetically. On the other hand, that was good enough for her job, which was more or less being a glorified hit woman.

Guess who hires her.

The worldwide cult of conspiratorial nerds who sit in shadowy rooms and plot the secret ruling of the world. I know. What a shock. That was how we met, however. She’d been sent to kill me, I kicked her ass...The rest was history.

Most people would be worried that someone was trying to hurt them. I’ve had it happen before, though. Her name was Jasper. It’s not new or different the second time around. Anyway, Amethyst was a short, curvy Indian-American woman in a beat-up leather jacket, and she spoke first. “Yo. Lappy.”

“...Yeah?”

“Why’d you ask me to come here?”

“I wanted to ask you some stuff.”

“Damn, I was kinda hoping that we could, you know, talk. Get to know each other. Get really fuckin’ drunk. Is this about your job?”

“Yes. It’s about my job. I’m sorry to bore you, Amethyst.”

“Dude, it’s fine. What is it?”

I saw her continue to sip her beer, one eye on one of the dancers, who was quite thin and vaguely birdlike in her movements, in a graceful and strangely elegant way (though maybe I should expect that from a Faerie place), and one at the table. She didn’t really look at me. She burped and relaxed in her chair.

I tilted my head. “Do you come here that often?”

“Dude, I have a friend who lets me in. What were you gonna ask about?”

I sighed. How to approach this. ‘Hey, Amethyst, I have a meeting planned to talk to Jasper Princeton, explosion wizard, about something important. Namely, horrible mutant freaks patrolling Beach City and posing a threat to children. This sounds like it could be RoL business, so if I tell you I might be putting your poor, magically-incompetent ass in danger.’

Okay, maybe magically-incompetent was a bit harsh. More like...She was good with a gun, Jasper was an expert super-soldier, and I was an atom bomb. Speaking of which, you would have no idea how shocked I was to hear about that thing. I wondered if it was Inspired, or RoL work, but no. Humans being humans. Why am I not surprised? “Amethyst, have you seen anything strange lately, going on?”

“Dude, are you comin’ on to me?”

“You are really drunk.” I said, although Amethyst shrugged. “Drunk and distracted by the sexy, dude, and on top of it I was up ‘till like three studying for my Chemistry final. Why isn’t magic a class? Why can’t I major in fucking magic? Think about how cool that would be. Yo. Bro. Steven. I’m totally majoring in _magic!_ The kid would be so happy.”

“Steven...Should be kept safe.”

“We all wanna keep Steven safe.”

The loud music was starting to really get on my nerves, but things were copacetic so far due to us being in a corner of the club, away from the worst of the speakers. “We agree on that. Seen or heard anything about mutant monsters made of limbs and eyeballs fused together? Steven was nearly killed by one.”

Suddenly, she put down the beer bottle, her expression hardening. “I haven’t heard shit, but you need to go and fuck up whoever did that, fuck up the monsters, just fuck up everyone. I’m comin’ along.”

“No you’re not.”

“Why?”

“You’re a college student and you’re not even that good of a mage. You’ll die.”

“You keep the nerd around. She just left college. I like Peri too, but she’s not-”

“She has an arsenal of weapons and is working on robot armor. Amethyst. Trust me here, alright?”

  
“I’d better not get an invitation to his funeral.” She said, leaving some balled-up cash for me to pay with and walking away.


	8. Armor and Arrangements

I left the Mystic Glade to run after Amethyst, the sun’s pure glow a welcome contrast from the light show kaleidoscope of the Mystic Glade. There were quite a few cars in the lot, the most notable being a Dondai Sonora, a shining little sedan that was probably out of my budget’s range at the moment.

She walked away quickly, and I sped up my pace. She began walking quicker as well. “What, do you want me to help now?”

“I want to keep you from going after them yourself.” The idea of an Amethyst ripped apart in two (or three, or four) due to my words was honestly too much for me to bear. Let it never be said that Lapis Lazuli fails to take care of the weak.

“Why? Because I’m not strong? Dude, I’m stronger than anyone gives me credit for. Not you, not the Republic, not Jasper, not even Peridorito. Wanna see?” She said, her tone actually quite jovial and upbeat, despite the words.

“As long as you don’t destroy any property.” I added. This was sort of a problem with Amethyst. Jasper was known for intentionally setting buildings on fire. Amethyst sort of just accidentally made things like TV satellites hit people’s houses. She was lucky she had a global conspiracy to pay people back for that kind of thing.

“Fine, fine.” Amethyst said, and flicked her many-tailed whip up into the air, the Dondai Sonora flicking with it into the air. She then flicked the whip back and forth, and two halves of the car split apart, flying through the air rapidly to crush themselves against the concrete. “That doesn’t count. Dude’s a prick.”

“You know the owner of the car?”

“Yeah, I memorized the number. It’s Kevin Duchesne’s car. This fuckin’ douchebag who hit on Steven’s teenage cousin and who illegally drag races. He won’t miss it. It’s probably his backup. So, is that good enough? I’m employed as a magical gun for hire, I get my work done, I go to classes, and I can split a car in half. What do you want from me, Lapis?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want you dead. Peridot likes you.”

“Don’t you?”

“I tolerate you.”

“God, you’re a Grundy.”

“What?”

“A Grundy. You know, a stuck-up old person? It’s a twenties thing. You probably wouldn’t understand.”

“...No. You’re right. I wouldn’t be able to reference something that was commonly used around me for most of my early life. Good job.”

“Ugh, you don’t need to use the dry sarcasm. I’ll just fuck off and make sure that Steven doesn’t, you know, get hurt or something. If you’re not gonna protect him from the monsters, I’m gonna. Also, I’mma stop and get some fry bits. Shit’s delicious.” She said, walking off.

* * *

 

I am Iron Man. Well, I guess I’m Iron Woman, or Iron Lass, or something, but by building off of my normal science prostheses (Because having my legs blown off by a Republic space junk cannon at age 16 just feels awesome) and my limb enhancers (Because sometimes being tall is worth being disoriented and using imperfect finger-to-floating-finger technology), and by ripping off the first Iron Man movie and several issues of the comics, I now had created a very cool green robot suit.

I looked at that robot suit, the glistening green and gold armor plating, the badass helmet with the diamond-shaped...hair thing, the floating little fingers that could become a holographic tablet screen...God Almighty. For those who are wondering, no, I did not want to rip off Extremis, too. I don’t want anything coming out of my body that’s also related to mad science. Mad science seems risk-free, but you can push it. Seriously, what kind of threat could stand up to this thing, anyway?

Nope, I’d be pretty much safe forever wearing this. Not that I was wearing it. No, sadly, I was in the usual work clothes. Those would of course be the overalls stained with oil, grease, fry sauce (ketchup mixed with mustard), and liquid strontium-90. In case you’re wondering, liquid strontium-90 is a very volatile but high-energy liquid I had to invent to make my original prostheses, and I’d been making it ever since as an easy fuel source for my limbs. It also was a great way to avoid having to implant something into my chest like the actual Iron Man.

I wiped my glasses clean with the blank t-shirt underneath my overalls (which was also stained with fry sauce and glowing, blue liquid strontium-90), and sighed. Well, this was going to be a bitch to clean up.

It was Sunday, two days later, and three people sat at a red-painted wooden table outside of Beach Citywalk Fries. None of them ordered anything, and the kid who mostly ran the place didn’t bother to ask any of them to order food or go find somewhere else to sit. He normally did this.

On the other hand, Jasper was there, and he could recognize someone responsible for 3% of the murders in Beach City. It wasn’t that she was on TV. No, that was covered up reasonably well. It was that he once saw her beat someone’s head in with a staff, say a few words, disintegrate the body, and ask for some fries.

So he didn’t ask the group to disband.

* * *

 

I, Peridot, spoke first. “Look. We made it on time. I’m here, Lapis is here, you’re here...So...”

Jasper held up a finger and turned to the kid in charge. I saw him look away on reflex. He responded. “Is there anything I can get for you?” God dammit. I sighed and spoke to him. “Peedee, are you ever that formal?”

“She kills people.” He said, as if it explained everything. Personally, I didn’t think it was that great of an excuse, but whatever. Jasper ordered. “Fries and fry sauce.”

“Fry sauce?” Peedee tilted his head.

“Mayo and ketchup mixed with a fork. I still can’t believe you people don’t have fry sauce here.”

I whispered to Jasper. “If you just ask for mayo and ketchup mixed with a fork, they can usually get it. The name throws people off in the East.”

  
Jasper nodded and relaxed in her chair. Lapis, meanwhile, was making little geometric designs and bird sculptures out of the soda in her cup, which she’d opened up as soon as possible. Sometimes, she’d make a bird’s beak or wing swoop into her open mouth, just for fun.


	9. Flowers and Fries

Jasper waited. I wouldn’t describe it as waiting patiently, given that I haven’t seen her wait patiently for my entire life, but I would say that it was more patient than she could have been. Quickly, she got her fries.

Too quickly.

I never get my fries that quick.

Dammit, why do people have to be so afraid of murderers? I could go and become a notorious killer if I wanted to. I mean, I have the tech and the tools. I’m just better than that. I’m not some lumpy, clumpy clod who’s only good acting as a living bomb. No. I’m important. I’m well liked.

I bet Jasper doesn’t have trouble paying for everything. I bet that Jasper doesn’t have to eat greasy-ass Peter Piper’s Pizza sometimes. Speaking of, Jasper spoke. “So. You all want to know what’s up with the strange creatures. I can’t tell you everything, since I only know a part of that puzzle, but I can tell you what I know. Have either of you heard of Bismuth?”

Lapis shook her head, and I nodded very slowly.

I spoke. “Bismuth? Yeah. I know about her. She was going to detonate a cobalt bomb in Phoenix, right? Kill mortals and everything else in the area too, and make it so that nothing could live there again for decades. I was kind of impressed in a weird way. Using mad science to make something that’s just outside the reach of modern practical science...That’s...That’s close to what I’d like to do, ideally. Although without the mass murder, obviously. Anyway, she was caught and nearly killed by a SWAT team, who took care of the bomb. What’s the issue?”

Jasper growled a bit. “You know why she did it, right?” I knew. Jasper continued. “Well. She’s gone. Disappeared. They never found her. She and I always had our...political differences. I support the system, and do what I do within it, she always wanted to burn it down. Something about defending humanity instead of funneling its creative resources to us. She’s out there, and until I have confirmation that she’s dead, I won’t be able to sleep well at night. I can’t do it, she knows my tactics, but you two are powerful, especially, as much as I hate to say it, the Water Bitch’s abilities. Ice Bismuth, bring me proof, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

I turned to Lapis. “We can’t do this. I turn a blind eye to Amethyst’s job, but this...This is killing another human being.”

Lapis began to think on it. “She nearly made a city into wasteland.”

“We’re not Jasper. Are we going to start solving our problems too with murder? Where does it end? Oh. Right. I know where it ends, Lapis. With you using your powers to get blood out of your clothes while I, God forbid, start gunning down innocents with repulsor blasts because it’s easier than telling them to move out of the way.”

“Two children nearly died because of the monsters. Bismuth’s no saint. Let’s just do this.” 

I responded to Lapis the only way I knew how. Long strings of expletives. “God fucking dammit, you stupid clods! Now we’re assassins, is that it? Clods!” I yelled up at the sky slightly melodramatically.

Lapis put a hand on my shoulder, and we walked away, to leave a cocky Jasper at the table with her fries.

* * *

 

The moon was a silver disk in the sky, one that gave me no small amount of bits of bad memories. Fragments. Little fears in the night that came into my mind, in and out, of waiting, of being dead. Not dead. Death is an end. Something between. Memories of my silver purgatory. Or maybe it was Hell.

Nonetheless, the hill I was on was a massive thing, mountainous, even, with a strange multi-armed woman carved into the front. At the bottom of the hill was a beach house, but the stars glistened at me, while I was at the top of the cliff. I squirted some water into the air from one of the bottles in my coat, making a blade out of the water and pricking her finger.

I was never good at summoning things.

I couldn’t summon, really, nor could I bind anything to my will. However, I could ask politely for anyone who might hear in another plane of existence to see me. “Mighty and graceful sidhe, Pearl, the Knight of Flowers, of the Summer Court, I, Witch Lapis Lazuli of the realm of mortals, beseech you, come, I wish to bargain.” I whispered.

It took a while. I mostly sat cross-legged on the grass, with the blood of my cut dripping in the tiniest of trickles down to the grass. I waited. Maybe it was a few minutes. Maybe it was an hour. I would check her phone, but the bright screen would be garish against the soft lights and dark hues of the night sky.

So, after some time, a cut in the air opened up, revealing a field of strawberries the size of a person’s head growing on bright bushes. A woman walked through, lean, thin, with careful motions. “Hello?” She said.

I nodded. “Hi. Sorry to bother you this late.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“Right.”


	10. Deals and Death

I sat in her bed in her apartment that night. Having finished a long session fantasizing to thoughts of the things that could be done with water control, I relaxed for a while, opened up my laptop, and decided to actually look at some porn on my bed. After a bit of that, I decided to do something productive.

Namely, complete a video game. _Undertale,_ specifically, and very late at that, considering how it had come out a year ago, but I really didn’t want to bother with working on some glorious creation, especially as my main store of supplies was in Lapis’ office. So it was time to finally murder all of those goddamn imaginary video game friend monsters. My cursor had nearly touched the icon for Steam on her desktop. My phone then rang. I sighed, put the phone to my ear, and let the call through. He spoke. “Hi...Um..It’s Greg Universe. I got your number in the yellow pages. You’re the detective, right? I’m calling about my son...”

_Connie Maheswaran was not armed that night. She didn’t have her sword, she wasn’t planning to train, and she most certainly did not think of being killed. Frankly, she simply wanted to get back to the Universe residence, maybe talk about the newest Unfamiliar Familiar book, which came out despite the series having formally ended, as some kind of weird after-finale, and relax before going home._

_She felt something underneath her._

_It was odd. The slightest trembling._

_It was most likely her imagination, so she continued to walk down the brightly lit boardwalk. People of all shapes and sizes littered the beach, few as they were this late, and most of the shops were still open._

_Connie inhaled. There was a cracking noise. Then another. Breaking wood, snapping wood. She reached for her sword, nothing. Steven turned to the left, turned behind her, saw something._

_They ran._

* * *

 

I looked up at Pearl, the ethereal being looking more like a holographic projection or the like than a person. Just a bit too lacking in detail. Too bright against the dark sky. Pearl asked the obvious. “What do you want?”

“I want to know what’s going on with monsters made of limbs and eyeballs.”

“That...doesn’t sound like something I could help with.”

“What about Bismuth? Do you know who Bismuth is?”

“I know about her. She’s waged a one-woman war on our kind. I can gather...something about equalizing things, or something, but it’s mostly little notes she sends after exterminating everyone in sectors of various cities in North America. Luckily, she seems to have stuck to Canada and the Winter. I hate to say it, but they sort of deserve it.”

“Can you help me find her?”

“I can. For a price.”

That was it. For a price. Always goddamn ‘for a price’ with these people. Fae, warmages...for a price, for a price, for a price. “What happened to doing the right thing?”

“It sort of fell by the wayside.” Pearl shrugged apologetically.

“I guess I’m just a fan of the old ways.”

“Please don’t say that. I’m older than you. Oh, and those are the old ways.” Pearl laughed. “Don’t worry, I don't need anything immoral. I would say it’s not illegal, but I haven’t checked this area’s legal codes since it was founded. Interestingly enough, I was there.”

I didn't really care, honestly. “Okay, then what the hell do you want from me?” Pearl recoiled a bit at my anger, but nodded. “There’s a human woman. I don’t know her name, I only have her appearance. She reminds me of the Summer Queen. Too much. I want to meet her.”

“Could you just ask for her phone number?”

“I saw her in passing, and it didn’t cross my mind. Phones are sort of a new invention for me, you see. If it helps you, she’s going to a Mike Krol concert this coming Saturday. I overheard her talk about it.”

“Why don’t you go?”

“I’m a seven hundred year old Fae knight used to another plane of existence. I’m not comfortable doing so.”

“So you’d rather have the ninety-year-old woman out of time with an abrasive and apathetic attitude?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. How can I find Bismuth?”

“One of my pixies found her base. It’s built in an abandoned ironworking company in Chicago, centered around a fortified forge and a nuclear fusion reactor. Bismuth shot the pixie’s hip before he could fly off, but he made it.”

“Great. So I’m flying halfway across the country to kill another human being. Any idea why she does what she does?”

“Almost nothing but what I said. The little notes are vague. Again. I’m genuinely sorry. This is really kind of a thing that I don’t know a ton about.” She extended her hand. “Anyway, I’ve told you how to find her, and you’ll help me find the mystery woman. Deal?” She extended a hand, I sealed the deal with a handshake, bleeding finger and all. “Would you mind healing this?”

“Sure.” She wasn’t perfect at it, and she could only do small wounds, unlike the Summer Queen, but she did heal the little cut across my finger.

 

* * *

 

I considered the situation carefully. Some clods were hunting people, burrowing, nearly killed the same two kids kids,  and actually killed several bystanders. ‘Her head crushed in a giant hand’. Jesus goddamn motherfucking christ.

  
It was not time for _Undertale._


	11. Texts and Traveling

I considered the situation. In a week I had to get someone who was socially adept and knowledgeable about the world of modern day rock concerts to get the number of a mystery woman for a faerie. My first thought was, of course, Amethyst. I drew my phone from my pocket and sent out a quick text (texts, I still have no idea how they work, and I suspect many up-timers secretly are the same on that front).  _ Dear Amethyst. It’s Lapis. As you would probably know from the little name at the top of the screen, but still. _

Amethyst responded.  _ Sup? Just made sure that Stevie’s doin’ OK. Before you ask, Pearl insisted I find some spellcheck/proper grammar app or whatever for my phone. It was kinda bugging her. You know, lowercase shit, u’s for yous, that kinda thing. It’s really gettin’ on my nerves. Like those apostrophes. Look at the fuckin’ apostrophes. Like my phone’s all like “What, you wanna not have a g at the end of your word? Fuck you, have an apostrophe. This is apostrophe city here. _

_ I’m sure.  _ I texted back, sort of wishing that I hadn’t asked Amethyst as a first resort.  _ Look, I need you to do something important. Something that is an important part in the struggle against the forces of chaos and destruction and such. _

_ Dude. What? _

_ Go to a rock concert and find a mysterious woman and get her number.  _ I hoped that this didn’t sound as ridiculous as I wrote it sounding. Honestly, it probably did. Eh. It didn’t matter.

_ Are you kidding me? Why? _

_ I’m not. Pearl wants it.  _ I frantically texted, hoping that it would be clear to Amethyst that I wasn’t pulling anything.

_ Of course P wants it. No. I’m not doing it. I’ve got shit to do. Will not doing it kill the world or something?  _ She responded.

_ No. I’ll just have to get Peridot to.  _ Maybe this sounded smug or taunting, but, again, I didn’t care.

_ Seriously? Dude, I love P like a sister, but she’s a tiny nerd. You’d be better off doing it yourself, and you’ve got the whole Batman thing going on. _

_ Detective.  _ I corrected.

_ Batman WAS a detective. _

_...Sure.  _ I sighed audibly.

_ Didn’t you know about Batman? _

_ He wasn’t around when I was alive originally. We didn’t have any “superheroes” or whatever. I’ve learned a bit about them from being with Peridot, but that’s it. Peridot mostly sticks with Marvel. _

_ That’s because Peridot is a fucking dork who can’t see that DC’ll get better soon, and the New 52 wasn’t THAT bad. _

_ I don’t know what that is. Goodbye, Amethyst.  _ I sighed again.

_ Bye, dude. _

I went to text Peridot.  _ I need you to go and find a mystery girl who looks like the Summer Queen at a Mike Krol concert on Saturday.  _

_ Why? _

_ It’s my payment for getting information on Bismuth.  _ I explained.

_ Can’t Amethyst do it and then get drunk? _

_ No. She’s “got shit to do”, whatever that means. _

_ It means that she’s going to have to kill someone. Probably multiple someones. _

_...Christ. I didn’t expect her of all people to use some sort of euphemistic slang for that kind of thing. _ You never expect that of someone like her, honestly. I knew it was her job, but still.

_ Amethyst is Amethyst, but fine. I’ll do it, Lapis. You owe me, though. _

_ You have to be joking. I already owe Jasper.  _

_ It was a joke. See! I can do them! _

_ Right. _

_ I’ll set it as an alarm. _

I turned off my phone’s screen with a click, slid it into one of my outside coat pockets, and took the half-empty bottle of water, drinking from the remains as I slowly walked down the hill, the moonlight illuminating my form.

At the moment, though, I had bigger concerns to deal with. Namely, that I would have to take a human life. I walked down to the street and waited. I don’t know how long I waited, but I waited for a taxi. Finally, one came, and I paid to go to the Empire Airport. This was distinguished from the Empire International Airport by the fact that it was smaller. I’d learned a year ago that “International” didn’t mean much when airports were concerned. 

The ride was bumpy, winding, and I was almost certain that the cabbie intended to take as much money from me as possible, but eventually we arrived at the step to the glassy doors of the older Empire Airport. I could hear the chattering of...everyone, really.

I passed through the doors and felt the engineered warmth of the ticket-purchasing-area. Please don’t go after me for not knowing what that’s called, we didn’t have many airports. Maybe we had one or two, but I didn’t know of any in my area. I paid for a ticket to Chicago, Illinois, the somewhat resentful woman glared at me, and I went on my way.

Eventually, after no small amount of harassment and pointless time-wasting, in no small part to the TSA, I made it onto the small jet heading westward. Honestly, though, I’m willing to accept all of that nonsense. Two hours in the air later, I left the metal wonder and/or deathtrap, searched for another cab, and tried to figure out how I’d find a single old building in the entire Windy City.

They really should have called it that. Windy City. Why call it “Chicago”, anyway? The name made no sense in my mind. Perhaps the cabbie might know where she was, if she was unsubtle enough. “Hi. Do you know where I could find Bismuth?”

“What’s a Bismuth?” He said, a bit angrily.

“A woman in an abandoned metalworking office. She’s armed to the teeth and probably going after all sorts of supernatural creatures.”

“I don’t know about Bismuth, but I do know about the Psycho Locker. Chicago PD’ve been trying to break in for years. Some kind of gun turrets and reinforced walls keep’em out. It’s sort of a drinking game we all have. Every time the news gets to another attempt to get in, you get a shot.”

  
“I’m breaking in. Take me there.”


	12. Bismuth's Bismuth

Have you ever had a bus ride as a kid that took forever, or a drive down to see family you never liked too much that seemed to take up half your life? Where you were just begging in your thoughts for it to be over, for it to end, for someone to save you from the misery, open the door, and let you go about your horrible, horrible day?

I felt the opposite. I would have rathered this overly-long cab drive through purgatory to take forever, almost, then. It was long, it was a slog, it was painful sitting in that stinking cab with nobody else to talk to, worrying that every turn would be more cash I’d have to pony up, and you know what?

I still wanted to be in that cab then where I was now.

This was the Psycho Locker, he called it. Ridiculous name, but it wasn’t hard to see why. Just off Southcreek Parkway and the airport road was, well, the Psycho Locker. Imagine a typical building in a zombie movie. I don’t like them. I prefer the movies where you got to imagine voices for characters, take a bit to read them and take them in. Talkies in general aren’t great for me, but cheap scares especially just feel...cheap.

Not that I’m a film critic or the target audience.

Imagine, though, a building under lockdown. Barricades, boarded-up windows, a parking lot that’s empty and lifeless, and a door that’s been nailed shut. Now make that door the size of a normal house’s wall, make it reinforced steel fused together, to be just a wall, make the walls shiny and metallic, and cover over the windows in whatever kind of metal she was using. I don’t like to use guns. I’m not a great shot. I took some water from one of my six bottles, two half-full, one empty, and the rest full, and tried to approximate a bullet. Not a bullet, but hardened water might do okay in a pinch.

I hurled the little ball at where the crack in the door should have been, hoping to use that as a weak point. It wasn’t the best plan. The hardened water slammed into the door, made a crack like a bullwhip, and it was as if I’d decided to get a squirt gun to do the job. Clearly, Miss Atom Bomb would have to learn some subtlety. 

I sighed and went to approach the massive door. It was welded shut, but the welding job was a bit uneven. Like instead of welding normally Bismuth had just made a blob of molten metal somehow fill the space, with the metal blobbing across the front and back sides of the crack. That brought up the question of how Bismuth managed to get in and out, but your guess was as good as mine on that front. I ran a finger down the blob that had...blobbed over the front of the door, and found that while it was tightly sealed, there was a pinhole crack at the bottom, about seven inches from the ground, give or take a few. Given that I could see a little speck of light through it, that was something. Bismuth, whoever she was, was sloppy.

Either that, or this was a jury-rigged hideout. As I inspected the door, I found little dents all across it. Same with the walls, walking along those. Battering rams? Explosives? The PD had apparently been all over this place for years. I tried to get some water through the pinhole, the same water that had spilled on the wall from before, and found that there was some kind of barrier. Damn. 

So, it was time to do the unexpected thing. I yelled into the pinhole crack, hoping the sound would go through. “Bismuth! This is Lapis Lazuli! I’m a witch, and I’d like to talk to you.” I omitted that I was a detective, since I felt that a fugitive would justifiably be a bit uncomfortable talking about that kind of thing. I heard some heavy footsteps and a deep woman’s voice. She spoke with some joviality. “Someone actually came to the door? Seriously? Look, what do you want?”

I tried to think of a convincing lie. I was already going to kill her. May as well break another commandment. “I’m here to talk about your cause.” I heard her sigh and walk away for a bit, before the metal in the door melted away, revealing a gutted office building full of weapons you’d find at an international military convention. Drones, guns, bombs, robots of all shapes and sizes...All labeled, many mounted. Crates of ammunition along one wall. 

In the middle of it all was Bismuth. She looked at me, with a slightly cynical but nonetheless hopeful expression. “Lapis, was it?” She ushered me in with a hand gesture, and I followed. She whistled, and the goo fused back with the door and closed it shut. “Grey goo. I don’t like to rip from fiction too much. It’s how our enemies operate. I try and innovate myself.”

“Our enemies?”

“Yeah, you know, our enemies! The RoL, the Fae, whatever magical crap’s still walkin’ around after the RoL’s mass killings and whatever...Even the Inspired and you magical types. All of us are chains, but we’re also the key. Crap. That wasn’t a good metaphor. So, you know anything about me?”

“Almost nothing.” I lied.

“Oh, well, my bismuth here is setting things up so that those of us with powers can be able to give humanity a utopia. See, the RoL doesn’t want to help humanity. Never did. They think they’re human, so they can justify taking what they want. Just their skills and born status or whatever. That’s bullshit. You, me, we’re not human. We’re different. Maybe not better. But different. We gotta embrace that and clear the way for people, set things up with our powers to make the impossible dream real. A true utopia. No hunger. No disease. No war. None of that bismuth. We can do it.”

“It’s just that the meddling Fae war and the conspiracy are keeping people from helping humanity.” 

“Yeah. The Fae don’t care about people. Okay, maybe some do. But they in general just don’t. They’ve got their shit, and their shit hurts everyone. War is war. It’s messy, it’s violent, and there are no good guys. There’s also always collateral damage. Trust me. The RoL don’t even have that excuse, Lapis. They’re just fuckin’ assholes.”

“You still tried to murder thousands of people.”

“The Fae kill each other, the RoL kills anyone it wants, vampires drink blood until their victims die, werewolves eat people, mages like Jasper act as the Devil’s hand on Earth. It would have been one bomb to save an entire planet.”

“The planet seems just fine right now.”

“I’m sorry you and I disagree. Should I open the doors back up?”

  
“No. Keep them shut.” Like hell I was going to risk letting anyone else see this.


	13. Breaking Point

I wish I could have said that it was an even fight. I wish I could say that she fought back, that I almost died, that she used those weapons in her arsenal. I wish I could say that what I did was right. I killed a serial killer. A terrorist. A mass murderer. I probably saved lives. Rationally, I probably did the right thing. I still can’t shake the thought that this was a human being, and she never was able to reach for a gun. It was probably rational. Damned if I don’t want to puke, though, and for what? So that Jasper can...God dammit.

_I looked around in the arsenal, at the closed doors, covered windows, and the woman standing in front of me. I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to do it now. “Just a second. I need a drink.” Bismuth nodded, and replied. “Yeah, sure. You want a Coke? I have a fridge over there.” She pointed to a slightly out of date fridge._

_God knew I wasn’t killing her with her own soda. “No. I keep water with me.” She shrugged. I drew a bottle of water from my coat and opened it up, aiming it just a bit towards Bismuth. I then willed the water to shoot forth like a blade and fall down, cleanly bisecting her from the middle of the right shoulder to her left hip. Blood and viscera left the cut, same with sliced bone. She said nothing. I took the water, made a disc underneath me, and smashed open a hole in the ceiling, which was, as I suspected, made of the original overlapping metal instead of whatever the walls were, as I don’t think many of Bismuth’s enemies used air attacks. Who’d order an airstrike in the middle of Chicago?_

_I levitated on the disc up out of the air, having to dump all of my water bottles into giving it a “tether” to at least have something to push off of. When I said I was an atom bomb, I meant it. I just wish that that was a good thing. Oh. Great. I have probably one of the strongest connections to the element of water in all of human history. Doesn’t matter if I just murder people with it. I couldn’t look down. I didn’t want to, dear god, I didn’t want to see the corpse._

* * *

 

I am Iron Gem. Yeah, it’s a weird name, but it fits the number of syllables and my name is Peridot Diamond for Christ’s sake. Of course I’m going with Iron Gem. Even though that name makes no sense unless you know my secret identity, but fuck it, there aren’t any supervillains around. If people want to blame Peridot Diamond for being an armored fighter of evil....Cool. They can totally do that.

This is awesome. I stepped out of the office and activated the repulsor jets of my suit, the green metal and visor sparkling in the sunlight a bit. After that, I fucking flew. Like a rocket. Have you ever had a dream where you just kind of push off the ground, and then you’re flying? That was me. I did that. The houses, beachgoers, people on the street, the cars, they all were so fucking tiny, and I could hear the wind muffled through the helmet of the suit, the one with the pointy diamond head, visor, and no nose or mouth or whatever. As I am a very smart person, I set up a selective noise cancelling system so that, in addition to being disabled, I wouldn’t also go deaf.

“Do you hear that world? Peridot Diamond can fly now, and if you don’t like it, suck on my power armor, clods!”

I just hung there in the sky, in ecstasy, giggling underneath the helmet.

* * *

 

Peridot, Jasper, and I were sitting back at the fry place a few days later in the summer sun, as I’d made arrangements for it as soon as I came home. “Jasper, I killed someone for you. Someone who didn’t attack me. Someone who would have let me go.”

“She wasn’t innocent.”

“I know.”

“So because she treated you well you’d overlook the fact that she almost vaporized a city.”

“I never said that.” I insisted.

Jasper shrugged. “Whatever. Proof you did it?” I briefly drew her head from a bag I’d bought in Chicago, and put it back. It was a nice bag. Shame to ruin it. I tried not to puke. I’m a detective. Not an assassin. Even a goddamn child should know that most people aren’t used to the idea of murder.

Jasper nodded.

I leaned across the table, one arm on it, glaring at her. “What? Tell us what you know!”

“I was fucking with you. Ninety years, you have to make your own fun. It's goddamn boring, and some of us didn't get to sleep through it.” She said, as if she were just noting that the pizza had arrived late. I kept my breathing in check here, before finally relaxing my muscles. Someone needed to pay for this. If I couldn’t have real justice, I’d have ancient justice.

An eye for an eye.

“Jasper, can we talk on the beach? Privately?”

“What, is this a date?”

“Call it what you want. I feel cheated and I was hoping we could renegotiate.”

“Sure.”

I noticed Jasper check her side to make sure she still had her staff. She turned to Peridot. “She’s not gonna kill me, right?” Peridot shook her head. “I didn’t think she could do it to someone else. Trust me, if she were going to do it, she’d have done it a long time ago.”

Jasper laughed a bit at that and paid for the fries for the group, and Jasper and I slowly walked down to the beach. I found a rocky outcropping with few people around it, and suddenly tendril-blades of water slashed Jasper’s throat, snapped her staff, and dragged her into the ocean. No words, no staff, no wizard.

  
I turned to find Peridot standing behind me, having apparently followed anyway. Her words were apt for the situation, and probably carefully considered. “What the fuck, Lapis?”


	14. Broken

I turned to Peridot. I said nothing. For the first time in my life I had taken two lives. Neither were saints, but this wasn’t a movie. I couldn’t just write them off as having deserved it. I’d sunk to Jasper’s level, and worse, I’d done it easily. Bismuth and Jasper had no intent to hurt me, there was no duel in either case.

 

I’d just coldly taken my first shot and made sure that it would do the damn job. No ambiguity, no potential for failure. I’d murdered two people with less hesitation than if I had wanted to purchase a smut magazine. I’d fucking murdered two people. You know, in the old days, “fuck” was a new word. It wasn’t used much before that. People would rather use the holy to swear. Goddamn or whatever. Fuck was profane. It was the essence of the twenties. Old vs. New. The things you said to make a point didn’t come from God, they came from sex.

So maybe that’s me. Lapis the atom bomb, Lapis the f-bomb. New. Profane. A creature of the 1920s. Inherently destructive. I sighed and collected myself. That couldn’t be the case. These had to be mistakes. They weren’t, though. They were purposeful, clear killings, with calculated intent and two obvious motives.

I wished I was on the other side of it. That I could be the detective dissecting what kind of person dispassionately cuts someone in half, or neutralizes their source of power, slashes their throat, and disposes of the body. What kind of fucking psycho would do that? Well, there were many psychos in this world who would do that. I knew it perfectly well.

Maybe Jasper did deserve it. She had a trail of bodies, was dedicated to making many more, and she’d tricked me into killing someone else out of boredom. Maybe that wasn’t too bad. Maybe...I didn’t like the thought, but I could sort of start to accept that I’d killed Jasper. No. I couldn’t accept it. I’d see her face sometimes, I knew it. This would begin some hellish nightmares, some trauma I couldn’t begin to experience. Depression, probably. Well, I was already a bit of a cynic.

Bismuth, though? By some measures, she was worse than Jasper, by others, she was infinitely better. Maybe she’d be the woman to save the world if I hadn’t killed her. Maybe she’d be yet another mass murderer with a vision. A Pol Pot, Hitler, or some other fuck I’d heard about.

I didn’t like the word “fuck”, personally. It felt wrong on my tongue, or in my mind. In some masochistic attempt to feel something, I kept using it. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck fuck, fuck, fucking fuck, ‘What the fuck?’” Peridot tilted her head at me and looked up. “Lapis, are you okay?”

Thank God, a conversation. Anything to drag me out of this trainwreck of thought. “No. I’m really not. We need to go and watch a talkie, or talk about your video games, or read some Camp Pining Hearts fanfiction together at home, or anything. Dear God, anything!” I know I probably looked ragged, terrified, trembling, standing rooted in place. That’s probably because, inside, I felt so much worse.

You never think about how much would have been packed into those stolen years until you take them.

* * *

 

I was fine with murder. I know that that sounds sort of ridiculous. Lapis Lazuli’s breaking down in front of me and I’m just okay with murder. Okay, maybe I should make this more clear. I’m okay with justified murder. Bismuth was justified. She killed a lot of things, would probably keep doing it. Jasper got what was coming to her. Maybe I read too many superhero comics, maybe my non-murderer mind’s a bit spoiled on this kind of thing, but those two deserved to die, in my opinion.

The world needs heroes. “Lapis. You’re a hero. You did the right thing. You saved so many more lives than you took. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do, Lapis.” She turned to me and responded. She didn’t look as though she was going to tear up. Lapis never really did that. She just had black holes for eyes. “I don’t care what I am. Let’s just read some fucking fanfiction before things get worse.”

I nodded and took her hand, deciding for once to be the responsible adult, and walked with her to the car. “You wanna drive and take your mind off things, or is that not safe?” I knew depression. Being bipolar, if I wasn’t on some nigh-magic medication I’d made years ago, I would be doing a lot worse. Sometimes you want something when depressed to take your mind off of the crushing nightmare. Sometimes you want to drive off a cliff. That was why I didn’t own a car, and that’s not even talking about mania or mixed states.

“I want to focus.” She nodded and sat in the driver’s seat, and while I worried that she might do something, I honestly thought that she was probably the only person able to drive, as I hadn’t used my license for years as anything but an ID. I had a little bit more driving experience than a rock. I took the passenger’s seat, and put my hand gingerly on her shoulder. She gave me a look, and I put the hand back in my lap.

So this was what the next...who knew how long this would last for? I was used to psychiatrically-induced depression, and even with that I’d only been on the receiving end, and that was years ago. Misery after doing something like that? I didn’t know how long that would last. Look, I just read comic books and crap.

She drove, following the rules of the road to the letter. I think that she had a little checklist or something in her head that she was using to focus on, you know, anything but murdering two people. On the bright side, it made the drive pretty safe. Wait. Was that insensitive? It probably was. Dammit!


	15. Amorousness and Antes

My name is Lapis Lazuli. I’m 5’8”, I was born in 1904, I like salty foods and pleasantly cold nights outside, I think I might be in love with my roommate, and I just murdered two people in cold blood, one, let’s be entirely honest here, out of rage and spite. I’d like to say I did it because Jasper was a monster. Jasper was a monster. I still did it because she made me sink to her level. I wasn’t thinking far enough in advance to decide to kill her as some kind of vigilante.

Most murders are spur-of-the-moment. Statistically, that’s true. While Bismuth was an exception, Jasper was not. I parked outside of our apartment. I sighed, took in the summer for a bit, tried to think about Percy and Pierre, and then I unlocked the car doors, opened the 80s Japanese car that had long since begun to degrade up, and stepped out.

I know I keep harping on it. I hope that nobody’s getting bored in the peanut gallery. I promise you, though. It’s not like the movies. If you’re at all sane, and you kill someone, you will remember it. It won’t just be another dead character, another thing that happens. It’s on you. Everything they could have done, good and bad. It’s not like the movies. It’s just regret. Maybe that’s why I wish both of them had put up a fight. How fucked up is that?

I laughed a bit about that dark thought, and Peridot gave me an odd look, so I stopped. I approached the apartment building and Peridot followed. We took the elevator that had to have been maybe 20 years younger than me, which is to say from the 1940s, or, very, very old, and it didn’t have the benefit of being perfectly preserved forever as a twenty-three year old woman. Now twenty seven. I lost the metaphor, there, but that’s something to focus on.

The elevator continued to move upwards. Peridot turned to me, and asked something. “Is there anything I can do to make you feel better? Anything?” I responded simply and to the point. “Drugs.”

She shook her head.

* * *

 

We left the elevator and opened up the door to the apartment, which was small, cramped, smelled faintly of mold, very, very teal, and was home. My home for my adult life, now hers. I’m going to be honest, here. This whole situation hurt. A lot. You live with someone for awhile, I guess it’s natural that you might develop feelings.

They’re latent. Under the surface.

Until that person does something like a double vigilante killing. As I’ve said, I really don’t blame her. I think she did the right thing. Look at her, though! Why does my brain suddenly go “You know how you’ve been secretly into her since when you went drinking years ago? That relationship that kind of started hot and then just became a roommates thing? Yeah, well, you’re into her again, and she’s suffering!”

I hate my brain. Thanks for reminding me now, you fucking asshole.

I know a lot of people hate their brains to one degree or another, but whether it’s not picking up social cues, being manic, or, yes, feeling lust and empathetic misery at the same goddamn time, I fucking hate my brain. I put my arm around her waist and opened our apartment door. “Sure I can’t do anything for you?”

I know I was kind of maybe secretly hoping for magic sex to make everything better. That was a sarcastic “magic”, not literal magic. I know in the real world sex doesn’t cure traumatic things, or really do a whole lot. I know maybe it’s wrong of me to want that. I’m desperate, okay. I locked the door behind her, and she put her hat and coat on the rack, wearing a long blue dress she kept underneath now. “Peridot?”

“What?”

“Everything’s gone to hell, so I don’t see any reason not to risk things even further. I went all in with Jasper, I lost the pot in the end. I’ll just say it. I think I love you.” She sighed and went to the kitchen to pour herself a drink. I froze up for a bit. This was a defensive reflex. Freezing up was more socially acceptable than just saying something stupid and ruining everything aloud.

I used to do a lot of saying stupid things and ruining everything aloud. I do that a bit less now. Which is nice. “Well. I love you too, Lapis.” Honestly, the four words, ‘I love you too, Lapis’, were like a breath of fresh air in the middle of the drowning. I love you too. Maybe not everything was going to go to hell. Maybe we could stop all of the monsters, the violence.

I hoped so.

On one hand, we were outgunned, outmanned, armed with almost no information, and against an unknown enemy. Civilians. On the other hand, she loved me too, so one thing that I thought was unlikely at best came to past.

Fingers crossed, right?

Whatever. I went to the bedroom and lay on the old spring mattress, on top of the sheets. I closed my eyes and just relaxed for a while, keeping myself together, trying to find some distance in the middle of this. I knew that Lapis was probably reaching for a drink, but I’d always coped differently, because I, Peridot Olivia Diamond, am a fucking nerd who doesn’t drink except when beautiful twenties detectives bring me to bars, and that doesn’t really end well.

That in mind, I took deep breaths in, and out, and in, and out, over and over, getting into a kind of rhythm. You’d think that I, being a woman of science, wouldn’t do that kind of mysticism. No, it does have a verified effect on brain functioning, and it does seem to make me calmer.

  
Round two, bitches.


	16. Terror and Trauma, Part I

I knocked on the door to her office. Garnet, PhD in Psychotherapy. Neuromancer. That was what it said on the door. ‘Garnet, PhD in Psychotherapy. Neuromancer’. I honestly wasn’t sure what a ‘neuromancer’ was. The office building her office was in was clinical, with a potted plant I was sure was fake against a wall. Her door was wood, with a golden nameplate. I knocked three times. Steady yourself, Lapis. It’s not weird to go to a shrink. Even if this isn’t at all the kind of thing that you’re aware of. This never happened in 1927.

Or at least, not that I knew of back then. Amethyst, though, had a friend, and that friend was a psychotherapist. Luckily, Amethyst also got that friend to give me a free session out of kindness. I waited about half of a minute, before the door opened, and a tall black woman with some surprisingly cubical hair received me. Her motions reminded me a bit of Jasper, though while Jasper was constantly swaggering or relaxed, hers were simply there. She existed. She took pride in it, clearly, but didn’t center herself around that pride.

She wore a leather jacket and jeans, along with working boots. I didn’t know what I’d get from a one-named psychotherapist, but this definitely wasn’t it. I walked in, and she ushered me to a brownish room lined with bookshelves containing books with titles such as “DSM-V”, “Bipolar Disorder and Adolescence”, and “Severe Personality Disorders: Identification and Treatment”. I took a seat on an older brown couch, which felt like sitting on compressed pudding a bit, and she found a chair, a swivel chair. Of course, she closed the door beforehand.

“Hi, Lapis.” She smiled a bit. By a bit, I mean that she barely smiled at all. It was almost imperceptible. I responded, stammering a bit. “H-hi, um....Garnet?” God dammit, Lapis. I’m supposed to be the social one.

“Tell whatever you feel comfortable with.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with anything right now.”

“Tell me what you’re OK with saying, then.”

“I killed two people.” I expected her to recoil in horror, to break the act or something that she had going on of her perfect serenity. She didn’t. She nodded. Just a bit. “I see.”

I began to breathe more deeply. “I fucking murdered two people, Garnet. One was a terrorist and one was a mass murderer. I slashed the terrorist in half and...Dear God, I cut the wizard killer’s throat, broke her staff, made her body be dragged into the ocean. I killed two people with magic. Why isn’t that horrifying to you?”

“It is. It’s just that I can’t change it. Nobody can bring back the dead. So I try and accept that and focus on what I can help you with. Your pain.”

“That’s callous.”

“No, that’s reality. The past is immutable. The future is able to be changed. Regret is there to tell you you’ve done something wrong. Now you know. There’s no more reason to feel regret now that you know not to do this again.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“You don’t need to, and I don’t want to try and make you. If I were you, I might accept that I can’t change the past.”

“I can’t change the past, I know, but I still killed two people. Are you going to report me?”

“No. Bismuth and Jasper can stay dead. Bismuth has good ideas but had to be kicked from the position of Summer Emissary for her deeds, and Jasper was...Jasper.”

“You know them?”

“I have a side talent in mind-affecting magic. I help people see things they need to see.”

“Can you do that for me? Will it heal me? Stop the pain?"

“It will heal you, but you have to let it, and you have to take the pain from the process. It still won’t be perfect. Just a help.”

“I don’t care. Get into my brain.” I said, tersely.

She nodded and made an “mmhmm” noise, and her fingerless-glove-clad hands rubbed back and forth. I saw little sparks and a chilly mist appear around them. “What’s with the sparks and the mist?” I asked. She shrugged. “Long story.” She approached me, squatting down to get closer to eye level, and took my hat off to put her hands on either side of my head.

I fell.

I fell further and further into a field, a mess, a maze, a nest, a cloud of white butterflies. Golden white. Like virtues come to live. No. I wasn’t that good of a person. Maybe sins? I had no idea. I kept falling through the blue void she’d created, and I screamed. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out, let me out, let me out!"

Blue became silver became blue.

I fell further.

The butterflies stopped, I didn’t. They hung there in the air, in their swarms, chirping. Wait. Butterflies don’t chirp. I heard them chant.

_A magician fallen, broken grace,_

_The detective’s drowning fates,_

_Sing the song of the Water Witch,_

_The killer and her Exiled Glitch,_

_A magician fallen, broken grace,_

_The witch detective’s drowning fates..._

It was in my voice. Or, well, my voice shunted up a few octaves. “Let me out!” I summoned up all of my vocal energy, trying to crack this. Nothing but the hanging butterflies, which became more and more of a little spot as I fell. “What’s the point of this?” I screamed. I hit the ground with a crack, a meadow, and felt no pain. Above me was a cocky, burly warmage in her usual trench coat. Jasper. “You know.” She laughed.

“No. I don’t! I killed you! I fucking killed you!”

  
“You did. It hurt.”


	17. Terror and Trauma, Part II

I heard the butterflies chant, faintly. Like little whispers hanging in the air. Butterflies don’t chant. Butterflies don’t goddamn chant.

_ A wizard fallen, broken grace, _

_ The detective’s drowning fates, _

_ Sing the song of the Water Witch, _

_ The killer and her Exiled Glitch, _

_ A wizard fallen, broken grace, _

_ The detective’s drowning fates... _

I pointed up at the cloud and yelled. “You! Shut up!” Jasper laughed at me and asked “Are you OK, Lapis?”, in probably the most condescending way I could imagine. I tried to stand up, staggering to my feet after slamming into the meadow. Her throat began to open up. As if someone had unzipped the cut I’d made. She now talked with a gaping wound. “I really hope that you’re okay, Lapis.”

“What’s the point of this? What’s the point of any of this?” I asked whatever this thing was. She shrugged. Jasper shrugged.

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

**_Think for a second!_ **

I turned, behind me, to hear that last phrase said in a distinctly different voice. Her voice. Peridot in full armor behind me, a metal gauntlet on my shoulder. Her words were muffled a bit, like she was speaking through water, unlike Jasper’s perfect speech, but she could speak. **_Lapis, just....just think for a sec, okay? You’ve got all this guilt, and fear, and shame. It’s going to leave on its own. Let it go, okay?_ **

Jasper tilted her head, reaching into the cut in her neck with one massive finger, idly. She began to toy with it. She didn’t speak, but she turned around. Finally, she created her staff out of a line of butterflies and said one word.”Pictura”. The butterflies, in a tiny cone, flew down to merge with one another in their fleshy forms, creating a blob.

Slowly, the blob grew arms, legs, and a human shape. Dreadlocks. An apron. This weird simulacra of Jasper laughed, air exhaling through the cut across her throat. “Honestly, I’m kind of impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Bismuth clearly began to form, although her head had the appearance of being sewn back on. Poorly. As with a needle. As she spoke, she exhaled tiny butterflies. “It’s over, now.”

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

I turned to Bismuth, or whatever this imaginary thing wearing her skin was. “You killed people. You were planning a genocide. Don’t act sorry for yourself.”

“I was going to save humanity.”

“Speaking as a human, we didn’t need your solution!” I yelled, and part of her exploded into butterflies, as if she’d been hit with a flamethrower or something. She stopped speaking, and Jasper continued. “Why’d you do it, Lapis? For the greater good?”

“No. I’m not lying to myself that much.”

“Why, then?”

“Desperation and rage. You made me kill her, I killed you for making me kill.”

“You hate both of us, though. What the hell makes you so worked up about it? Weren’t we going to duel to the death, all those years ago? 1925, I think?”

“1927, and I was desperate then, too.”

“Aren’t you always desperate, Lapis? Well, desperate when you need to be, anyway. Convenient way to keep the moral high ground and get to do everything I do.”

“You do it more.”

“I thought we were operating on a ‘one kill makes you irredeemable’ mindset, here.” She laughed, and Bismuth screamed. “Do you have any idea what you fucked up? I didn’t have a backup, or an AI copy of my brain, or anything! Because of your high-mindedness the world’s going to be enslaved to whoever’s strongest!”

“That person would just be you!” I yelled, and she was hit with another blast, butterflies falling off of her and into the air in the explosion. She stood about halfway, now, and the half of her that remained sighed. “I just wanted to fix the world.”

Jasper held out one hand in Bismuth’s direction, and one in mine. “So, Lapis. Is it that killing is wrong, because you’ve always been willing to do it. Just cut the crap and be open with it. Me, I think Bismuth’s delusional. Anyway, not like it can be changed. We’re here, but we’re not here, get my point? Good job, on your part. Really.” She glared at me.

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

_ Witch. _

I looked behind me to ask for Peridot’s help, but she was silent. “Are...Are you going to say anything?” She turned to me and removed the helmet of her armor. I’d never seen it in person, so the armor was based on sketches she did beforehand. She’s actually quite the artist. She removed her helmet, and Garnet was inside.  **_Repeat after me, Lapis. ‘It’s done’._ **

“It’s done.”

**_‘I can’t change any of it’._ **

“I can’t change any of it.”

**_‘These weren’t innocent people.’_ **

“These weren’t innocent people.”

**_‘I did what I thought was right.’_ **

“I did what I thought was right.”

**_‘I’ve saved people they would have hurt.’_ **

“I’ve saved people they would have hurt.”

**_‘It was wrong, but I am more than just two moments.’_ **

“It was wrong, but I am more than just two moments.”

Garnet put on the helmet, and then the person in the suit took it off, revealing Peridot’s head. Peridot began to speak, a gauntlet moving to brush against my face.

**_Who are you, Lapis?_ **

“I’m a killer.”

**_Maybe, but we've talked about that. We don't need to right now. That conversation's done. What else are you, Lapis?_ **

“I’m a detective.”

**_What else are you?_ **

“A witch. Someone trying to save people, save kids, from monsters. A friend. An ally. A fan of silent movies. Someone who drinks a lot of bottled water. Someone who likes fry bits.  A soon-to-be girlfriend...”

**_So just think about that, okay? It’s done, it’s probably for the best, and you’re more than you think you are._ **

  
**_Wake up. The Peridot your mind hasn’t made should probably see you._ **


	18. Daybreak and Diamonds

I woke up in our bed, in a nightgown, with Peridot in fleece green pajama pants and a “Invest in America, Buy a Congressman” t-shirt by the side of my bed, holding a plate of mandarin oranges. Wait. Mandarin oranges? You know, at first I thought I had died and gone to heaven, but the mandarin oranges just made no sense. So, because of this, my first thought upon waking up to speak with the real Peridot was “What the hell is with the mandarin oranges?”

“Geez, I just thought you’d like some mandarin oranges! I’m sorry for offending you or whatever!” Peridot said, somewhat defensively. “It’s like 1 AM. I was working on the Iron Gem Mark II, and Garnet called that you needed to be brought home. I had to use the suit to lift you, since you’re kind of heavy. In a physical sense, not a fat sense.”

“You mean because you’re weak.”

“I’m not that weak.”

“You can’t even slap people hard enough to hurt them.” 

“I can kick people into goop. If I wanted to.”

“Limb enhancers don’t count. If that were true then once those arm enhancers are complete you’d be able to access the internet as an inherent...It doesn’t matter. Look, thanks for the mandarin oranges.” She nodded, seeming quite proud of her efforts. 

“Also, Lapis, the Arm Enhancers have been codenamed the Iron Gem Mark II, since I’ll be able to fold them into the suit if necessary, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, are you alright? All I got was that Garnet knocked you out. Should we be trusting her?” She asked concerned.

I nodded. “No. She’s...She’s good at her job. I’ll be seeing her for another session sometime in the future. She gets into your head. In a good way.”

“You’re not going to fuck her, are you?”

“No! What? No!” I said, sort of out of order. “I’m not fucking my therapist. I’m ready to go and-” I began to eat the mandarin oranges. They tasted good. Too good. “What’s with the mandarin oranges?”

She looked at me, confused. “These? They’re good mandarin oranges. Like, from the health foods place. They’re not our usual crap. I wanted to go all out for you, since you fell asleep after therapy right after we confessed our mutual love.”

“Oh. That’s good. I sort of thought that someone spiked the mandarin oranges.” Peridot shook her head, sighing. “Christ on a unicycle, Lapis. Calm down. Nobody’s spiked anything.” She put a hand on my hand. “Are you feeling up to addressing that ‘declaration of love’ thing?”

“Hell no.” I said, laughing a bit. “We’ll get around to it. Weren’t we going to read some fanfic, though, or something?” Peridot nodded and responded. “Yeah. Sure.” She stood up and brought her franken-laptop over to the bed, putting it on my lap. She then slid onto the bed next to me.

As the bed was sort of small, we were pushed very close together. It was slightly claustrophobic. That was luckily outweighed by the intimacy there. She brought up the first episode of Camp Pining Hearts on stream. “If you’re ever gonna read fanfic, Lapis, you’ve gotta actually watch the show.”

We fell asleep watching the misadventures of Acadians trying to find love.

* * *

 

My name is Yellow Diamond. No, that isn’t my given name. It was changed. To suit a codename. That is what I am. A codename. The leader of the Republic of Letters, and nothing else. I received the message in my cavernous home by a secure channel. That was what it was. A secure channel. If you tried to specify more with Inspired workings, you would simply give holes to exploit, but the defining characteristic of this channel was that it was secure, and enough people saw ‘secure channels’ in film and such to make it work.

The message went as follows. “4234000023445686. 64. 70. 1. 5. 2. 44. 343. 5315327688.” Translated, it read “Beach City. Department of Natural Philosophy. Experimental Biology Subsection. [REDACTED]. Attack. [REDACTED]. [REDACTED]. Gamma-Level Alert. Coincidence Rating: 4. Kiki Pizza.”

A Coincidence Rating of 4. My, that was interesting indeed. In the highest levels of the Republic of Letters, we believe that it is good practice to assume there are no such things as coincidences as much as is reasonable. This meant that two other notable happenings in the region occurred. “You.” I turned to my much shorter assistant. “What were the other incidents that contributed to the Coincidence Rating?” She began to work furiously on a massive holographic interface, and shouted them. “Two attacks of this kind, one killing of Bismuth, one killing of Jasper, ma’am!”

  
Oh, dear.


	19. Alexandra and Amethyst

_Alexandra’s first memory was in her aunt and uncle’s house. She would later date this memory to it being around 1969. The month or day she had no idea. She saw beige walls, a mirror rimmed with gold paint and patterns, and a clock, with hands that at the time she couldn’t read. She still couldn’t quite remember what time it was, consequently._

_Her father had been shot to death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, years ago. Her mother, dear, sweet, loving Joyce, the woman who treasured Michael Cartwright so, hung herself soon after. Alexandra would later learn that Joyce Cartwright probably suffered from depression, but a toddler would have no idea of that._

_Alexandra found that she could make little mechanical birds intricately woven out of paper clips to fly around and give her something to focus on in the wake of the funeral._

_Her extended family were kind and loving, and until Alexandra was about fourteen she lived a more or less happy life, her aunt, uncle, and her cousin, Charles, were all good people who did good things. This would not last. At age fourteen, Charles died of tuberculosis. It was latent. There were no symptoms. At the time, none of the family could have predicted it._

_She tried to talk to her family afterward, but conversations were awkward at best and Alexandra was never very social._

_It was then that Alexandra began to withdraw into her room to read as many books as she could get her hands on. Technical manuals, scientific textbooks stolen from her classes or lent to her by one or two teachers interested in this odd child. After all, the women’s lib movement had begun, and so some were sympathetic to the idea of a little girl taking an interest in science. One even informed her that the preserved Victorian house in Phoenix with the nailed-up door had a password. Three knocks on the door and “carpe noctum”. Alexandra wrote this down but didn’t think much of it._

_She read her books and went to school, making birds out of paperclips to fly around and amuse herself. She learned as she read that this should be impossible, that what she had created was not real. So she began to flip through some of the boys’ superhero comics that she bought, selling her birds at school._

_She didn’t talk to her family much. Her routine was basic. School. Schoolwork. Reading. Comics. Bird-making. Sleeping. By age seventeen she’d grown bored of her birds and just stuck to reading. It was then that she’d vowed that she’d make it big, someday, and took a bus from Alberquerque to Phoenix to find the Victorian house._

_She knocked on the nailed-shut door three times to hear something click, the doors opening, and the girl found herself, pleated skirt, bag, and all, in a shining city full of people, like something straight out of Star Trek. She showed them an old bird she’d made, said that a teacher had long ago told her to come there, and that she wanted to help change the world._

_They asked if she knew anything about science. She responded that she’d been learning about it non-stop her entire life. She started out her time with the Republic of Letters organizing filing cabinets and arranging meeting places for low-level agents. She quickly showed that she had a knack for management as well as simple science, and a remarkably cool disposition, even a cold one._

_At around the age of 18, she met Jasper, and quickly grew to depend on Jasper’s “Finger of God” approach to problem-solving to deal with messy loose ends._

_Ten years after that, she grew her third child (not to raise, obviously, but for scientific purposes) in a test tube at one of her facilities in New Mexico. This one showed a few defects, but she wasn’t going to kill a child._

_Soon after the "birth" of her third child, Alexandra had been elected by the Council of Advisory Action of the Republic of Letters, with the recommendation of Blue Diamond for the former’s years of exemplary service and competence in administration and scientific achievement to her highest position: Yellow Diamond._

* * *

 

 

I knocked on her door a few times, sort of impatiently. “Yo. Dudes. Peridorito, Lappy. It’s Amethyst.” I sighed and waited for them to finally get on over to the door. Look, I know I sound kind of...impatient at the moment and whatever, but hear me out.

So, I’ve just come back from the Summer realm, since I’ve been hanging out with Birdmom, you know, P, since she has a really sweet mansion there, being the Knight of Flowers, and she’s pretty cool if you get over a lot of her slightly OCD qualities, and...What was I talking about?

Oh. Right. Basically, I’ve been chilling with Pearl, and then a pixie steps through the closed door of her house and is all like, “My Knight of Flowers, portentous events have occurred! Bismuth and Jasper have been slain, and we know that Jasper was killed by the Water Witch, as it was done brazenly, in broad daylight.”

So.

Someone fuckin’ iced Jasper. Also someone named Bismuth, but I don’t know who she is, so whatever. Welp.

No more fairy martinis for me.

I guess I’ve basically missed all this shit, haven’t I? “Yo! Guys.” Finally, they open the door. Or, well, a giant robot that looks vaguely like Peridot, sort of, mostly just because of all the green does. “Is this Peri?”

“Yeah. What do you think of the Iron Gem suit?”

“My name’s a gemstone too, Peri.”

“Yeah, well, mine’s two gemstones.”

“Okay, look, I was out with Pearl in the realm of the Summer Court doing all kinds of awesome shit you guys missed. What did I miss?

“...Well...”

“What?”

“Lapis killed two people, both of whom were important to the balance of power in the magical-Inspired world, there are still monsters going after people, Lapis and I are in love and I think we might be girlfriends but I’m still not sure about that, Lapis is getting therapy for severe depression and trauma due to the murders...” She checked her phone for any additional news. “Oh, and the monsters killed Kiki Pizza.”

“Well, bitches, Amethyst’s home! Let’s save Beach City!”

“How are you so optimistic?” Lapis asked from the other room.

  
I shrugged. “It’s a skill, Lap.”


	20. Concerts and Cotton Candy Contacts

I, Peridot, don’t really like concerts. Honestly, I have a ton of sensory issues relating to loud noise, and it really didn’t help matters that that noise was music of a genre I kind of don’t like that much. I’m not really a music person, but if I’m listening to something it’ll be either really sterile techno, video game remixes, or Tom Lehrer. Cheery songs about nuclear armageddon. I can tolerate that.

Also, there’s nothing that gets the brain going like thinking about early atomic bomb tests. If you want to know the single best development in human history for the Inspired, it was the Bomb. When that thing was made, people started to really fear scientists not just for what they could do, but for what they had done. Fear of science makes people give it as much power in their imaginations as hope for science, maybe more, and imaginary science is kind of our thing.

What was I talking about? Oh. Right. So here I am, on the outskirts of this massive club, there’s lasers in green and orange sweeping back and forth, I’m dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans and I have noise-filtering earbuds in that read my brainwaves and filter out everything but what I want to listen to, namely a remix of “Megalovania”, from Undertale (and Homestuck, I suppose).

So, I’m here looking for some woman who looks like Summer Queen Rose. There’s a woman at the bar who’s got that same...pink hair and tallness? I guess? Rose has always been hard to describe. Like some kind of queen made half out of cotton candy and half from marble. I’ve only seen pictures. Well, best to take a chance.

I started to push my way through the mob of people to get to the bar, a smooth black counter with a man in a suit dealing drinks behind it. Luckily, the bar had an open seat, and so I struggled to climb up to sit down.

Eventually, though, I made it, and turned to her. “Uh...hey.” I said. She didn’t hear me. I made my earbuds let me listen to her voice with the power of thought, and spoke louder. “Excuse me?” She finally turned to me. This woman looked more like half-cotton-candy and half-carved wood. Less solid, but still...there, I guess.

She spoke. “Uh, hey?” She tilted her head a bit, clearly confused as to what I was doing here. I adjusted my glasses a bit. “A friend of a friend wanted me to ask you to get into contact with her. She’s a faerie. Tall, thin, has a nose sort of like a bird, might be carrying a giant spear? Or naginata. Or whatever it is. I’m not quite sure. Do you know her?”

“No, but she sounds pretty cool.” The woman brushed some pink hair from her face and took a long swig of whatever toxic liquid she was drinking. In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t drink. It kills brain cells. Except for those times I do drink, but they mostly convince me not to drink in the future. It’s a good system.

“This is gonna sound really, really weird, but she’s, you know, a being of another universe and made of all kinds of magic shit that honestly it’s kind of hard to explain, so if you want to contact her, and she really wants to contact you, spilling a bit of blood on the grass and asking politely to see her should do it.”

“Sure."

“What? You’re not weirded out by this?”

“Done weirder shit to get laid. Want a drink, or are you just here to talk about weird magic shit and listen to your own music?” She didn’t seem to notice that I could hear her and only her despite the music. Alcohol killing brain cells, I guess.

  
“Fuck it. What do you guys have here?”


	21. Zombies and the Zoo

Yo.

You ever think that what you're doing is a really, really, really bad idea? Like, worse than you thought? Like, it seemed like a great idea at the time, but no. No, no, no, no. No. Wait. I should probably give some fuckin' context here, I guess. So, while Peridot and Lapis are working on that weird overly complicated thing with Birdmom, and hopefully, like, making out or something, I kinda had a brainwave. Or, well, brain-thing. Whatever. I had a thought. You know how the whole question here's been 'Hey, what are those fucking monster things, who made them, and why are they murdering teenagers'?

Three questions. Whatever.

So. I remembered that I knew where shit like those things came from before. Not the exact same thing, obviously, but, like, I've seen zombies before. Science zombies. Not magic zombies. Totally different. Science zombies...The Zoo. Not like, an animal zoo, but 'Experimental Biology Research Platform Gamma - Abandoned'. Or, the Zoo, if you're me and don't want to say all of that shit. Basically, they made a ton of horrible mutants and didn't want to bother getting rid of them, because of reasons. Look, I'm not even a member of their little science cult. I just get paid by them. Fuck if I know.

Maybe they thought they could get more use out of the rejects? I dunno. They put them in cells, hired a mercenary company to make sure they didn't escape, and put Holly Beauregard, or, as she prefers, Holly Blue, for simplicity, in charge of it. I know because I got a tour once. What does that mean for me, right now, then? Well, let me give you the rundown. I'm sitting here on the outside of the north-side electric fence of the only thing on Veler Island, this massive fucking prison complex. It's 2 AM. Eastern Standard Time. All I've got is a whip and whatever telekinetic magic I can muster.

I'm planning to break into a fortified prison manned by a psychic vampire Inspired and a well-armed mercenary company. Yeah, you heard that right. Not...psychic, psychic, but, like...instead of eating blood she eats people's emotions, and according to the dumbasses who categorize these things, that makes her a 'psychic vampire'. Holly eats fear, specifically. So. Psychic vampire Inspired and like a hundred dudes with guns, along with the possibility that Holly gets really fuckin' pissed and opens up the cells, and now I've gotta fight all the mutants. I mean, I can see why they put her far away from anything too important. Vampires are nuts. Don't let the romance books tell you differently. Vampirism does shit to your mind. If you're lucky, you become a violent psychopath.

Ya know how in _Dracula_ they subtly kind of hint that even he's happy to be killed, since he's like, possessed by a demon or something? Look, I didn't read  _Dracula_ that closely, but I'm pretty sure I heard that from someone. Point is that I am totally fucked. Bent over the table, giant dick entering ass fucked. On the other hand, I mean, I already kind of came here by boat, and I'm not exactly going through all of the crap related to getting back to the mainland, and then fuckin' coming back here again to die...

I mean, I could, like, not come here, but this is my best shot. Holly Blue. Let's fuckin' dance. I whipped my...whip out at the fence, blasting it forward into the empty prison yard. Supposedly, before the RoL came along, this was an actual prison. Eh, who gives a fuck? The sound of sirens blared in my head over and over and over, and I saw two men in the guard table closest to me start to do...something. Whip crack. Hey. Look. It's funny how far you can fling bodies into the air if you just kind of try.

Oh my god that sounded horrible. I mean, it was hilarious to see the dude just flailing, but still.

What the fuck, Amethyst?


	22. Feeling Blue, Part I

I slashed down my whip and ripped a hole with my telekinetic powers through the fence, running through it as quickly as I could. This place, it sapped the life out of you. A concrete fucking hellhole meant to be a concrete fucking hell. Blocky buildings, grey skies, endless armed guards who turned and aimed their guns at me. They didn't fire, though. I wasn't sure why. I was about to use my whip again and try and do something, but then I realized that if I did anything I'd probably just get shot into bits. So, I just kind of waited there.

And waited.

And waited.

Until, finally, she came out. Matronly, orderly, overly serious...Yeah, there's a lot of ways to describe Holly Blue. She left some building, and I really couldn't tell you what that building was, just that it was really goddamn big, and I saw her dressed in her usual thigh-high white boots and blue...everything else. For someone going by Holly Blue, she really seems to like the color blue. Maybe I should have expected that. You know how you'll see Nazis in movies who are really stuck-up, and strand up straight, and shit?

Holly Blue had that kind of attitude.

Apparently I'm not supposed to be comparing people to Nazis. Fine. Sorry. Whatever.

Anyway, my point is that...you know how sociopaths can pretend to be pretty normal for a while, but secretly are totally cool with murdering their family or whatever? Yeah. It's kind of the same with...Fuck, I'm totally losing my point, here. Anyway, Holly Blue looked over at me. Well, she sneered at me. Looked down her nose at me. "Amethyst. To what do I owe the pleasure?" She rubbed her temples in annoyance. Bitch.

"Well, one, don't shoot me. Two, I wanted to ask about some shit."

"You don't say." Before I could do anything, she uncurled some kind of cable from her side. Not a cable. A whip. Then, with a sound sort of like the clicking of a lighter, it became covered in electricity. Mother fucker. She then slammed it into my side, and pain coursed through my body like the entire left half of me had been attached to a car battery. Stupid motherfucking goddamn mad science vampires. I hit the ground, and I tried to move, but my body just wasn't really up for it. So, because she's Holly Blue, she walked up to me and drew something from her pocketbook. Sleeping pills. Which she force-fed to me.

"I'll have to answer your questions in different circumstances. Glory to Yellow Diamond."

 


	23. (Temporary) Interest Check

I'm considering coming back to this story, but I was wondering if anyone would find it interesting or not after all these months. So if you are interested in seeing it or any of my other stories resume (and if so, please mention what story you're interested in by name), please comment. Thank you!


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